Gutenberg’s printing press was feared by scribes all over the European continent. Scribes in Paris managed to have this new invention banned. Well, for twenty years.
The industrial Revolution lead to the mechanization of factories. The Spinning Jenny, a weaving machine, could do the work of many weavers at once. The fear of becoming jobless led people to destroy the machine. We call them Luddites today.
Back in France workers threw their shoes into the cogs of a machine, clogging it. The French terms for these shoes is “Sabot”, hence the term sabotage.
In more modern times, People feared that computers would eliminate their jobs.
Yet all of the above inventions opened up more job opportunities than they rendered obsolete:
The printing press led to a publishing industry. The number of authors, biographers, journalists, editors, writers, illustrators, book shop owners and clerks grew rapidly. Faster production and distribution of books in larger quantities supported education of the general populace, quickly increasing literacy in Europe and thus creating more customers for printed literature or news gazettes. Job creation was not only restricted to a workforce that could create, maintain and operate printing machines.
It is a similar story with all other technological inventions that followed. On balance they have had a positive impact on societies.
Now, what new industries might AI create and which kind of jobs will boom?
Short of possessing a crystal ball or time machine (both currently out of stock on Amazon), it is hard to tell. But consider that AI is very different from all previous inventions. These were dumb tools. Complex and surely useful, but still dumb as they could not operate without human help, also they could not be retrained to do something different if required. None of the previous inventions were able to reason and learn. If you believe latest news, companies developed AIs that can train the next generation without human intervention.
As AI is tasked to solve more problems or challenges, for instance in engineering, robotics, medicine and other fields it will come up with new technologies and medical advances. Imagine at some point, an automated factory creates robots designed by an AI for a specific task. Robots with the potential and increasing agility to gradually but inevitably replace traditional human manual labor such as plumbers electricians, firefighters, medical doctors, rescue workers and many more.
Extrapolating this, I ask myself “Is there a job that AI creates that it cannot do itself within a few months or years”? Where does it leave humans? Instead of defining ourselves by our profession we will have to look for other purposes to lead meaningful lives.
Brave new world!
