We’re Not Afraid of AI. We’re Afraid of Each Other.

How the rapid pace of innovation in artificial intelligence is laying bare the cracks in our own humanity.

It’s a wild time to be a person — especially a person who works in the knowledge economy. We’ve been spared many of the hard winds that have blown through the economy over the last few decades. Comfortably ensconced in the 9.9%, we’ve blithely reaped the benefits of technological change. We rode out COVID in the safety of our own homes, with jobs that made it easy to pivot to remote work. Hell, when it was all said and done, many of us came out ahead.

But now…now things are getting scary. Massive layoffs in tech are combining with dire economic rumblings and an absolute DELUGE of new products built on AI.

Artists and writers, accountants, lawyers and paralegals, finance bros, software engineers — there’s a new dire prediction every day about how AI will render us obsolete.

There’s a deep sense of unease I can feel in every corner. I sense it in the people who refuse to engage with AI. In the people who dismiss it as the newest fad. But I also sense it in those (myself included) who are desperately trying to get a handle on it because we figure, if it’s gonna happen either way, better be the person who knows what to do with it.

But here’s the thing.

AI is neutral. It’s just a tool. AI isn’t trying to take our jobs. It’s just doing what it’s trained to do.

Deep down, we know that. And that deep down knowing is where the fear comes from.

Because we have seen, time and again, how humans use technology and innovation to dehumanize one another.

And we know, deep down, that we’ve been complicit.

We’ve all seen the stories about egregious conditions inside Amazon warehouses. But we still have a steady flow of those smiling cardboard boxes hitting our doorsteps. And Amazon sales continue to rise year-over-year.

We saw self-checkouts replacing cashiers. But we still ran to scan food ourselves because it saved us both a little time and the discomfort of having to speak with another person.

We know fast fashion is a deeply extractive industry, with negative impacts on people and the environment. But even so, as I’m writing this article, fashion apps constitute 20% of the top free apps on the iOS app store.

We know that steady and reliable blue collar jobs have been decimated by automation and globalization. But we’re happy with lower prices and “made in china” stickers on every product.

But now, things are different.

Because this time, white collar workers are the most at risk. OpenAI itself, the company behind GPT, recently released a paper titled “GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models” which shows the professions with the highest exposure to being replaced by AI:

For the first time, we see ourselves in the firing line. And we know that our fellow humans won’t hesitate to replace us if it means squeezing a little more profit out of every line item. If it means getting our needs met a little more quickly, a little more cheaply, and a little more automatically.

AI will be a reckoning like no other. Not only because it’s as transformative as the internet or the iPhone. But also because it’s the natural end point of what we’ve allowed to happen since the day the first dial-up modem screeched its way into our lives.

We’ve been happy to reap the benefits for the last several decades, even while we’ve been aware of the great human costs these changes have sowed. But as the old adage goes, you reap what you sow.

So here we are, at a moment where we need to trust that our bosses and their bosses and their bosses’ bosses will value humanity over efficiency, personal connections over profit.

And we already know, deep down, which path they’re going to choose.