If you're worried about the rise of AI and you’re waiting for someone to tell you that it’s all going to be okay, you should probably stop reading right here. Because when Oliver Callan spoke to Dex Hunter-Torricke, the former communications executive for Meta, SpaceX and Google’s AI division, DeepMind, he was not at all reassuring. Here’s what he had to say about AI and jobs:
"It’s within organisations where you’re starting to see growth opportunities vanishing, AI nibbling away at people’s jobs, people who are really, really already well-equipped to navigate the future, getting disproportionate rewards as they jump into the AI future. I think 10 years from now, those effects will be vastly larger and actually the future advanced AI systems that are coming in the next decade will out-compete many, many workers and we are not at all prepared for that future as economies, as societies. It’s something that we need our leaders to start taking really seriously and come up with a plan for how to manage that."
Governments and their citizens might well feel like they’re powerless to do anything to prevent a future where a handful of individuals and corporations control all the money and all the resources. And if millions of workers are going to be surplus to requirements, how do they get by? One solution mooted by people within the tech industry is universal basic income:
"There’s an intent there which sounds good – you know, how can we share in that wealth with a much larger part of our society – but none of those systems at all have been tested, none of them have quite passed muster right now and it’s something where I don’t think we would think of it as a good future if most of our societies are kept afloat by a very subsistence-level universal basic income, while other folks are getting such vast rewards."
Hunter-Torricke got into the tech industry in the first place because he was interested in how we go about solving some of society’s bigger problems. And he says that when he started work there, the tech industry was a deeply hopeful place:
"And that’s how it should be. Tech should be a motor of progress in our societies. It should be about making life better. But we’re at a moment where these huge crises are manifesting in the world – AI, I absolutely do believe is going to play an exacerbating role in that if we don’t change course and think about different ways to manage that technology. And for me it just came down to simply, 'Where’s the place I can have the most impact on solving those problems?’"
That hopefulness has given way to obsequiousness in the face of political pressure and, more than ever, chasing profits. Today’s tech leaders seem less interested in making the world a better place and more interested in making themselves and their shareholders even richer. But, Oliver asks, they have to live in the real world too, don’t they?
"Every leader – pretty much – often ends up having tunnel vision about the future in some way. And a lot of people, when they’re at the top of their field, they naturally end up inferring that the world is mostly driven by that field. If you’re in tech, you think the entire world revolves around tech, technology should be the central thing in our society, which can then improve everything else. And I think there’s just a wild disconnect from the reality on the ground and in the lives of ordinary people."
Is there anything us ordinary people can do in the face of this technology hurtling towards us? Hunter-Torricke believes we have 10 years left to make sure that AI – in all the forms that it will evolve into over the next decade – is a force for good and not just power and profit:
"There are options as we think about how to manage these technologies. It will take a huge amount of creativity, and we’ll need to answer a bunch of problems we don’t know the answer to yet, about how we manage societies, economies, build regulations, how businesses should operate in that future. But we still have a chance to reshape these things."
It’s a chance we need to grasp quickly though, Hunter-Torricke warns, because the rapidly-developing technology will overwhelm our ability to chose. Let’s hope all the right people are listening.
You can hear Oliver’s full conversation with Dex Hunter-Torricke by tapping or clicking above. Hunter-Torricke's essay on Substack, Another Future is Possible is available here.