I’m afraid that the discussion of Artificial Intelligence ignores the main issue, and this is a global, existential issue, and this is a question of preserving the culture of mankind: very soon AI will be able to replace people in 60%, 70%, 90% of human “intellectual” activities, because these activities have been already purged of most intellectual content. An example: look at roles of people in the over-regulated and dehumanised administrative structures in (British) universities.
About 15 years ago, one of my young colleagues, a talented mathematician, leaving academia and a university career to work in a start-up, told me: “My new task is to make middle-level managers unemployed.”
In short, AI is the replacement of robotic humans with pseudo-humanoid robots (my neologism for “robots pretending to be superhuman”).
Added 04 May 2023:I want to emphasize: there is nothing philosophical in my thesis, I do not in any way assume that AI will be a kind of sentient being. I’m talking about AI as a crude, cheap to produce but overpriced stuff, at the level of Microsoft products or Facebook, – but this cheap stuff will start to make jobs of so many people obsolete, because their functions have already been reduced to something mindless, primitive, subhuman – and reduced not by AI, but by other people – their employers.
The key question is: who will this AI belong to? Who will profit from its activities?
