Navigating the Implications of AI on Society and Economy

We’ve been gathering data at a ravenous pace for years. It was only natural that data be put to good use. In many cases this was used to train machine learning models - I’m not here to debate the quality of the output, the issues that come from underspecification. My point isn’t to get into the nuances of artificial intelligence, rather I want to highlight the seismic shift that it will bring to society.

We’re still in the infancy of many of artificial intelligence but the impacts are very much on the horizon. As a technologist, I often have to prepare for disruptive technologies and the implications - this one has me perplexed.

I think we’re moving to a space where we will eventually all have our own Jarvis (a la Iron Man), personal assistant, or agent as Bill Gates would put it. A lot of the jobs done today will be shifted because with automation, the need for human input would be reduced.

So what does this mean for the job market? Well it means as a society we might need to re-evaluate how we measure value. In terms of automation, we will need to consider the fact that some tasks are better if removed from our day to day. We have to look towards is with the time savings, whether that energy can be focused elsewhere.

Inevitably, we will also re-evaluate our current economic models.