Resilience in the Age of AI

This is the edited version of my contribution to Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures - Imagining the Digital Future Center by Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson.

‘If there is ongoing need for leaders, educators, professionals, this will be a sign that the AI revolution has ultimately failed and will signal a long-term limitation in the aspirations of humanity as a species.’ 

Stephen Downes, expert with the Digital Technologies Research Centre of the National Research Council of Canada, wrote, “It’s important to understand there are multiple ways AIs can play a role in our daily lives: As a stand-alone service, like ChatGPT; as an add-on service, like Copilot in Microsoft Word; and as an integrated service, like adaptive cruise control in a car. Right now, there’s a lot of visibility for the first two, but in the long run integrated AI services will be the majority use case and the general rule of thumb will be, what people don’t see won’t bother them. 

"After all, there are many more ethically objectionable practices hidden and integrated into many other aspects of our lives, from child labour producing our electronics, to the clear-cutting of rainforest to produce our beef and to dictatorships producing our oil. There is some unrest, but by and large global society accepts these as realities and there’s no reason to believe objections to integrated AI will be any stronger. 

“What people will see is that digital services, especially, become faster, more responsive and more personal. Instead of buying and downloading an application (like a word processor or RSS feed reader), for example, we will just ask our computer to make one for us. Or – even more behind-the-scenes – our cars will optimize power consumption to match our driving style. (AI will also be behind the scenes managing the power grid, but we won’t even think about that.) 

“The negative response will mostly come from older people and will mostly come from those whose livelihoods are impacted by AI. It will be similar to the objections people voiced to using automated tellers, or credit and debit cards instead of cash. It will become evident that resistance to AI is inconvenient, unhelpful and unwelcome. Meanwhile, on the other side, people will find themselves unburdened from legacy systems and able to use digital technology in ways previously limited to tech gurus and enthusiasts. 

“There’s a lot of discussion about how we will be able to preserve our skills, resilience and even our sense of self-worth in the digital age. But it won’t be a problem. Humans adapt and will take to our newly enhanced capabilities like fish to water. There is a lot of worry today about how to teach people how to use AI effectively and ethically, just as people were in the past concerned about calculators, spell checkers and driver-assist. But those who grow up in a world surrounded by AI systems will find new ways to be effective and ethical. 

“Probably the most significant thing we will need to learn will be to describe what we want clearly. This is not because computers are illiterate and will only obey the most precise instruction, but because there are so many possible ways to satisfy any request the computer will want more than a vague indication of ‘what would be nice.’ There will be some places where menus are offered, but the situation will be more like a restaurant that can make any dish known to humanity. Unless we want to go through a (very annoying) series of questions and answers, we’ll learn to just state exactly what we want. 

“While today there are concerns about personal privacy and security, in the future we will be much more willing to share information about ourselves to avoid ambiguity in our requests. So, for example, we will feed our address into the system so we can say ‘deliver it to my home’ to a parcel service, or ‘take me home’ to the automated cab service late at night. What will be interesting is if humans start communicating with each other that way. It is likely that the rules of politeness will change, to the discomfort of older people and as second nature to the young. IDK, YMMV. (I don’t know; your mileage may vary.) 

“A lot of our concerns will be more practical. Some people might have their own AIs that manage most aspects of their lives, while others may access AI services through cloud providers. There will be issues with AI compatibility. If our fridge can’t talk to our power system, we may have a problem. 

“AI providers will very likely induce artificial scarcity and embrace rent-seeking business models. Parents will find that their schools require one AI service (for instance, GG AI service), while their neighbourhood telecom supports another service, such as NC . And their cars might not run at all without monthly  payments to MM (all the major services will be referenced only with two- or three-letter acronyms, the inevitable outcome of the increasing brevity in trademarks).

“The traditional blue-collar and white-collar distinctions will evaporate with the elimination of most white-collar work by AIs and the elimination of most blue-collar work by robots. We can break down future employment categories into three major branches: those who care, those who service and those who experience. Here’s what future work will look like:

• “Those who care: Today we think of these as people who provide high-touch human services, such as nursing, teaching, hairdressing, dentistry and the like. Some of these functions will be automated (even today, I can watch my new tooth being printed in the dental office; in the future, we’ll use biotech to just grow them). But the care function – what we might think of metaphorically as ‘hand-holding’ – will be essential to help people through stressful events. This will require core skills like empathy and communication. 
• “Those who service: Today we think of people like plumbers, garage mechanics and hardware technicians (drive your car into one end, it comes out the other end completely serviced, like a car wash, but for all the bits that require replacing, tightening, lubricating, etc.). Again, most of these functions will be automated, but there will continue to be a need for people to do the things that haven’t yet been automated. People will constantly predict that it will eventually all be automated, but it never will be, not even on the software side. 
• “Those who share their experiences: Today we call such people ‘celebrities’ and ‘influencers,’ but there will be an ever-greater need for people to have new experiences to produce new ‘content’ (as we’ll call it) to enable AIs to keep learning and for the rest of us to react to. In many ways, experiencers will be aspirational, much like professional athletes are today, but there will be far more opportunities to enjoy similar experiences first-hand. Experiencers will test new ideas, experiment with new ways of life and living, explore and create. 

“The rise of these three classes of employment will be resisted and perhaps even derided, by those who make their livings in the knowledge industries, leadership, finance and the professions. These categories of employment have always defined the governance and structure of society. They have enjoyed greater material wealth and better lives, but as AI chips away at their systematic advantages, their numbers will decline and their prestige will dwindle. We are seeing some signs of this trend today, but in 10 years it will be obvious and after a generation it will be inescapable. 

“The questions and the concerns being posed in this survey reflect in many ways the questions and concerns that are being posted by this former elite. They say (to summarize) ‘what will people do without us to guide them?’ There is the suggestion that their greater education and wealth offer unique insights into the human condition – what we need to know, how we should define ourselves, what counts as resilience. They define what counts as cooperation, what it means to be productive, why and how people should be literate, what mental health looks like. They insist that we must have will and purpose, what challenges we must meet and what counts as creativity and courage.

“In many ways, these values mattered when it was necessary for smaller classes of humans to manage and lead larger classes of humans. But in a world where the primary skill is describing clearly what we want, actually being managed or led will be seen as an abdication of responsibility, not an example of it. 

“Experiencers, especially, will be expected to test our boundaries, while carers and servicers will be responsible for making sure humans and machines (respectively) are healthy and whole. If there is an ongoing need for leaders, educators, financial workers or professionals, this will be a sign that the AI revolution has ultimately failed and will signal a long-term limitation in the aspirations of humanity as a species.”