Ideas for our Future
Harnessing our joint Knowledge, Skills and Experience to address the big issues and opportunities of our time
This is an informative post provided as background to the post on Society and our Artificial Intelligence Future. In particular it explains the Job Disruption Scenario and Tipping Point Scenario.
What is an Artificial Intelligence Society?
An AI Society is one in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become totally pervasive. We expect to reach this point in the next 20 years in the UK.
Science, technology and especially AI has advanced to the stage where now, or in the near future, it has the potential to solve for the first time many of the cost and other issues we currently face, to improve the quality and effectiveness of things we already do, and to change our lives for the better.
In particular, AI will become pervasive and the benefits to our Public Services can be enormous. It offers, over time, the possibility of improving the productivity of our businesses and reducing our working lives and enabling us to do things that we couldn’t previously contemplate.
At the same time, it is recognised that there will, over time, be widespread replacement of existing jobs by AI. Some believe this Job Disruption Scenario will be mitigated by creation of new types of jobs, largely based on what happened in the industrial revolution and with computers. Others believe AI is of an entirely different order, because any new jobs will be capable of being performed by AI and we will reach a Tipping Point Scenario where there is a net loss of jobs.
The key issue raised by the Job Disruption Scenario is job churn, the speed with which it will take place, the time and cost of dealing with it and the impact on society:
The Tipping Point Scenario, if and when we reach it would bring additional issues including:
The Tipping Point Scenario would affect and overturn almost every aspect of how we operate our society. So, it is an opportunity to plan what sort of society we want in the future.