A Recruiter's Point of View on the Future of Work with AI

The advance of AI has brought us some existential questioning and anxiety. Not that we haven’t had anguishes lately as a society, but it has the potential of becoming a major change in all we know as truths in our ways of living, work and culture.?

In the last two centuries, capitalism and the advance of science have changed the way we “human”. For instance, capitalism has made us feel like the only way of being useful to society is through working like a small piece in one big clock engine: we work repeating our activities daily, constantly and if we ever show the smallest signs that we might break, it makes us aware that we are totally replaceable.

As for the advance of science, logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences have been determined as the “true intelligence”. And this is the main reason why we overvalue IQs, essays and quizzes. Schools and universities are a proof of this, but it’s not only their fault, educational institutions only prepare us for what society determines as the standard and, unfortunately, the standards are the expectations to perform well in the intelligences I cited.

To explain more about what are the logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences, let’s recap the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, created by Howard Gardner. Gardner states that there are eight types of intelligences:

• Visual-spatial
• Linguistic-verbal
• Logical-mathematical
• Body-kinesthetic
• Musical
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal
• Naturalistic

I won't be discussing each one because this will be already a long article and my goal is to provide my take on the future of jobs with the advance of AI, but I highly recommend that you research more about it once you finish reading this paper.

Okay, back to the main subject. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not entirely optimistic about the next years regarding the work culture with the advances of AI. It is most likely that we will face a huge crisis in what we know as our ways of living and mass unemployment has a high probability of happening.?

If we consider that our ways of understanding human utility to society is through helping the engines run, and considering that the machines we’re working for are companies, we then also have to consider who’s profiting from those machines running. And when we consider that greed, lack of empathy and lack of sense of community run in big business owners, they will most likely prefer to pay less and profit more to keep their companies running. No wonder slavery has been the main source of the economy for centuries and it still plays a big part in our economy, even illegally.?

So: how do we escape from the crisis that might come?

I believe this change is a call for us to remind ourselves of what it truly means to be human and what has taken our species to come this far. Throughout human history, nature, community and leisure have been keywords that we have seem to have forgotten when our modern economical culture arose. We have been running against the very foundation of our evolution in many ways.?

It seems silly that we have to reteach ourselves to do basic human things such as eating food that comes from nature, taking time to rest, socializing, caring for our neighbors and moving our bodies. And I, myself, have trouble with it as well. But as a psychologist, working with mental health almost always ends up being about teaching our pacients that doing natural human activities actually helps with the relief of their suffering and with finding true purpose for their lives.

I’m also almost sure if we invented time travel and brought a human from thousands of years ago to our times, they would have a huge cultural and personal conflict between thinking we are surprisingly advanced and amazingly stupid at the same time. And the funny thing is, we truly believe we are more intelligent than them, although they have the same brain structure as us modern humans. This same brain structure is what makes us suffer so much with our lack of contact with basic human activities.

And our modern culture has also made us physically lazy. No wonder we mostly only value jobs that are solely mentally stimulating and undervalue jobs that require physical preparation in important areas that have been with us for centuries such as: house building, farming, nursing, baking, etc. The thing is, if what you do at work has a predictable routine that follows only a textbook type of knowledge, AI will most likely replace you, at least in what it can read, contextualize and replicate.?

This is not a critique to science and mental work, though. It has helped us reach things we could have never imagined. But what makes us unique as a species isn’t just proving and replicating things, AI will be able to do that. What it can’t do and it won’t do is create hypotheses, change the course of expected actions through understanding the experience of being human and empathizing with others. And as long as we’re alive, it will probably never even learn how to do that. Until this moment, we know more about the universe than we know about our own brains, let alone have the power to understand and replicate full human consciousness.

In contrast to AI, no one single person is made of one intelligence type only. So, be more than just your career. Take a look at your experiences with a different point of view, no career is made solely of one type of intelligence, so go and explore the ones that are not AI’s strongest skills. Take this possibility of cultural change to explore and relearn human things. Get to know your community, be an active listener, exercise your empathy, maybe explore that childhood dream of yours that I’m sure wasn't sitting in a chair for one third of your life. Remember: you’re a person, with a unique set of skills and personality, irreplaceable for the people you have in your life, get in touch with that. This is what will help us keep going.?