How AI and Robots Are Likely to Lead to a Restructuring of Our Whole Society

Sam Altman, the man behind ChatGPT said something that many people may find a little alarming. According to him, our entire society is probably going to have to be restructured because of AI:

“But, over a long period of time, I still expect that there will be some change required to the social contract given how powerful we expect this technology to be. I’m not a believer that there won’t be any jobs, I think we’ll always find new things to do, but I do think like the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration.”

When “elites” start talking about how society is going to be “restructured,” the natural, healthy reaction is to be deeply skeptical of whatever they’re planning, but that’s just the thing. What Altman is talking about here isn’t so much a deliberate, controlled, changing of the way things work designed by some arrogant Ivy League grads, it’s going to be a radical shift in society driven by technology.

Of course, throughout history, we’ve had SHIFTS in the labor force caused by the improvement of technology. A single Cotton Gin replaced the manual labor of 20 human beings. When cars came along, they did so at the expense of the horse and buggy industry. Advances like the washing machine, dishwasher, microwave, and vacuum cleaner changed housework from practically a full-time job to something that could be managed in a few hours per week, thus freeing up the populace to put in more hours at their jobs.

What’s going to happen with robots and AI is different in that over the long haul, it’s going to take over and replace not just a single industry, but the human contribution to a large percentage of the economy.

Is it ready to do that now? No, but we’re already far enough along that you can see the handwriting on the wall.

Several American cities already have driverless robotaxis. ChatGPT is outperforming medical students on board exams. Robots and drones are increasingly being used in warfare:

AI is already writing code. It’s being used by major publications to write articles. AI video keeps getting better and better:

The same goes for AI art:

Is AI ready to completely take over from humans in any area yet? No, but given the rate it’s advancing, it won’t take long – and the robots are already there in a lot of areas. Now that we’re starting to get humanoid robots that will be able to follow simple commands like this…

…think of the number of basic tasks it will be able to do.

Start considering the possibilities of how many jobs we need humans to do today that this technology is likely to be able to completely replace in the next decade or two. Potentially, it stretches across much of the workforce – and not just at the bottom of the scale.

It’s possible AI will be able to create WHOLE MOVIES from scratch. So, will we need movie stars? Producers? Directors? Stunt men? Catering? Will there be factory jobs in 10 years? What about cabbies, Uber, bus drivers and chauffeurs? There’s not much need for drivers when the cars drive themselves. How many fast-food employees will you need when the robots can make the burgers, sweep the floors, and clean the bathrooms? Artists? Nope. Writers? As a writer, I hate to say this, but most writers are going to be replaced by AI. J.K. Rowling? Tolkien? Maybe not, but the people writing for the New York Times and Sports Illustrated? Absolutely.

Will OnlyFans still exist when AI-driven cyber girls can look hotter on a screen and give users a personalized experience? How about professors? Most of them already feel as if they’re overdue to be replaced in a world where the best professors in a given field could remotely teach millions of students at once. If Optimus and its competitors live up to the hype and can do jobs around the house, will you need cleaning ladies? Home repair? Someone to mow the lawn or plant the shrub you just bought?

Nope.

This is going to lead to two problems, one of which is obvious, and the other not quite so much.

The obvious problem is what do you do when there are tens of millions (and maybe even 100 million Americans) who are locked out of employment permanently because the jobs they would have filled are done by AI and robots? At this point, most people would say, “Well, we’d need Universal Basic Income,” but think about what that would mean.

We’d have an enormous number of Americans who would no longer have jobs – and jobs don’t just pay wages. Many people take a sense of meaning from their job. It also gives people something to do all day. So, that would go away and in return, those Americans would get just enough money to barely survive. Do tens of millions of bored, purposeless, poor people with nothing penciled in on their calendars for months at a time sound like a recipe for societal stability? No way. Sure, “bread and circuses” may help distract the unhappy masses, but as we saw with the Romans who had this problem in their capital city, it proved to be more of a temporary band-aid than a permanent fix.

Furthermore, this leads to the second big problem.

Who’s paying for the bread and circuses along with the Universal Basic Income?

If you say, “the government,” you shouldn’t forget that the government gets its money from taxes, and what we’re talking about is a huge portion of the populace becoming unemployed and thus, unable to pay taxes. However, the flip side of that is likely to be that astronomical amounts of wealth are going to flow to the people CREATING AI and robots. For example, if you own a company that replaces all the cab drivers in New York or $20,000 robots that are used in homes all across America, you’re going to make staggering amounts of money.

In other words, we’re going to have multiple trillionaires with more money than most countries in the world at the same time large numbers of Americans move to barely keeping their head above water levels of poverty via UBI. Theoretically, we can say that it shouldn’t be a problem, but as a practical matter, that level of inequality creates widespread societal discontent.

So, how would our society deal with that? Would the government confiscate robots and AI or ramp the tax rate up to 90% on the wealthiest people? Would the extraordinarily wealthy start building massive Roman-style projects to be given for free to the masses to placate them? Would we have a revolution where the rich were skinned alive, or the poor were slaughtered by the millions? There is no way to say how this is going to play out today. It’s just something our society is going to have to navigate.

This is still a fluid situation, but what we can say for sure is that it looks like big changes are going to be coming on a societal level over the next decade or two and all of us need to start getting prepared while we can.

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