The responsibility of AI titans in a post-work society.
Advocates of AI (and yes, before the pedants chime in, I’m aware that LLMs are not technically AI, but for the purposes of popular debate and perception — we’ll go with it) will tell you that automation will create new jobs and generate broad societal value such that it will countermand the coming societal shifts in employment and labour. And that may well be the case. We may be fortunate enough that an unexpected windfall will soften our landing and take the sting out of our automated future. But I don’t believe we can or should count on that magically happening.
I’m not arguing against AI. I’m not asking OpenAI to shutter ChatGPT or suggesting we shun its proponents and users. I am asking for a degree of ownership. For the creators and evangelists of AI to dedicate time and resources to envisioning and building the post-AI world beyond the boundaries of their own profit margins.
Invention must always be accompanied by a degree of responsibility — surely, if nothing else, we learned that from the development of the atomic bomb, from Los Alamos, from Hiroshima, from Nagasaki. The pursuit of AI is arguably a technological goal, at least on par with splitting the atom. And what we do with that technology, how we apply it, and how we think about humanity in the wake of it is as much a responsibility of its creators as it is of…
