You often hear worries about AI bringing automation and taking away jobs. If done right this can be a good thing. More meaningless activities automated equals more meaningful activities for people. It comes down to untapped human potential. Everyone has a potential to make a difference but often times that potential is not taken advantage of because people are working on low impact areas.
AI can help to create a society where resources are not scarce, they are shared. Autonomous cars is one of the examples. People will have less of a need to fight over resources. Here’s another example: automation = more effective and cheaper way of producing goods whichcan lead to the abundance of resources.
Automation will require us to rethink our societal systems. One of the proposed solutions combined with other reforms is Universal Basic Income (UBI) that will allow people to devote their lives to what they truly are good at. To fulfill their potential and contribute to the society in the best way they can and love. It can help people to live a life of Ikigai. More fulfilled lives = fewer problems created by humans.
Taking the time and thinking about fundamental things like this is crucial. It serves as the foundation for life. With automation and UBI people can have more time for such philosophizing and they can be guided, educated and helped towards a better life for themselves and the world, both of organizations and by AI itself. Our human tendency to “shoot ourselves in the foot” on an individual, organizational and societal level can be mitigated in various ways with the help of AI. We need to compensate for the naturally flawed parts of our minds. One science fiction example is a higher consciousness that could be achieved by merging ourselves with AI through Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). There are actually companies today working on it. Elon Musk's Neuralink and another company called kernel.co
The following brilliant videos from The School Of Life show the possibilities with AI in helping us navigate ourselves, others, the world and our potential.
Another technology that can help to create better societal systems together with AI is Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) such as blockchain and smart contracts. Such automation combined with smart AI makes it less possible for people to cheat the systems, for instance with corruption. It can also give more opportunities for direct democracy. DLT and AI can lead to better systems where resources are automatically calculated and distributed, where everyone (countries, companies, people) is incentivized for the social impact and collaboration, making it a higher priority and will lead to it coming before other things.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it is about the AI that frees us from meaningless work, augments our intelligence and helps us to solve the world problems and come up with advancements and breakthroughs.
AI = new opportunities -> growth.
This article was created at SoftRobot which is a Swedish AI company with the first product, Aiida, which is a teachable AI to automate the document workflow with a mission to rid the manual labour related to interpreting and processing the files and free up humans to reach the greater potential. We hope you could take something away from it.
