Humanity in the age of AI!

AI is here! 

We’ve heard this hundreds of times till this moment and almost have a nauseous feeling about it now! While AI is here and I will go on to say that it is here to stay perhaps longer than humans themselves in the form as humans exist today. 

So, what can we expect the future to hold for us humans? 

This question too have been answered by many and the body of answers to this question too keeps on growing by the day. Some broad predictions include the following: in the next one year, majority of computer programmers will be replaced by AI programmers or agents as they term them; in the next two years we all will have in our pockets, intelligence that’s equivalent to the smartest mathematician or a physicist et al or what they call Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); and in the next 3-5 years or maybe 6 years we will have AI that’s more intelligent than intelligence of all the humans put together or what they call Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)! And this is only on the software side! On the hardware and computing  side, we’d have quantum computing getting advanced and applied; and also married to AI and that will perhaps speed up the evolution from AI to AGI to ASI and well beyond! It’s not going to stop at that - the hardware will also mean robotics coming of age…the age of androids is well and truly ushering in!

With AI getting married to robotics and getting sophisticated and better and better with each passing day and ubiquitous, what will all this mean for us humans? So, with androids and robots abound with intelligence and mobility equal or better than humans, one clear result will be that humans won’t have jobs as we have come to know them over the last few hundred years! Most jobs and I’d stick my neck out and say 99% of jobs in services and manufacturing as we know today will not be existing in 10 to 15 years from now. 

So, what is human race going to be doing to keep itself engaged meaningfully? What has happened so far? The Industrial Revolution that started about 300 years ago led to creation of today’s education system that kept humans busy with this education system for nearly 25% of their lifespan and then the jobs as we have known them kept us busy for another 30-40 years and then once we were in our sunset years, we were inconsequential to powers that be and hence majority of the productive and energetic population was kept meaningfully or perhaps meaninglessly kept engaged! 

But all this is going to be turned on its head in the next 10-15 years - so, what can be expected? Chaos for one in the human society! Can this impending chaos be avoided? 

What’s touted as a solution is UBI or Universal Basic Income - but, is it really a solution? I think it’s more of a consequence of the cataclysmic changes that will dawn on us as human race in the next decade or so. And, the challenge of governments across the globe will be on how to keep people engaged meaningfully (not the meaningless job engagements humans had over the last 300 years!) with UBI just providing sustenance, not engagement! 

The survivability of human race depends on finding the new age jobs that will keep humans meaningfully engaged employing all their faculties aka physical, mental and creative ones in this upcoming age of absolute automation!