AI is not only bringing with itself great technological change, but it appears that it will also change society as a whole.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that AI could end up changing the whole structure of society. ”AI does more to help the poorest people than the richest people,” he said. “(This) is a huge part of why we want to built these tools. I think technology does a great deal to lift the world to more abundance and to better prosperity,” he said in an interview.
“I still expect — and this is over a long period of time, this is not a like next year or, you know, the year after that kind of thing — but over a long period of time, I still expect that there will be some change required to the social contract. Given how powerful we expect this technology to be,” he said in an interview.
“I’m not a believer that there won’t be any jobs (after AI). I think we always find new things to do, but I do think like the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration,” he added.
Altman didn’t specify what social changes could be brought about by AI. But one factor that might play a role in reshaping society is how white collar jobs might end up being disrupted by AI — over the last few months, it’s become apparent that most jobs in coding, medicine, law, and even creative fields like movie scriptwriting could end up being made redundant by AI systems. These are some of the highest paid professions in the world, and could quickly lose their relevance in the coming years. On the other hand, it might be a while before AI disrupts blue-collar jobs like plumbing, carpentry and construction, so it’s possible that in the near term, the social value of blue-collar and white-collar jobs could flip, and blue-collar jobs could end up being paid a lot better than white-collar ones.
But AI is also making rapid advances in robotics, so it’s not inconceivable that at some point in the future, AI will be able to perform blue-collar jobs better than humans too. At that point, AI systems will be better than humans at all tasks, and this could again change the social order. It might require humans to get some sort of Universal Basic Income, which Altman has himself proposed, and the determining of who all is eligible for this income and who’ll get how much could also require a re-understanding of our existing social contracts. Thus far, humans were the apex predator on the food chain because they were more intelligent than every creature on earth. And losing that spot by creating a new species that is more intelligent than themselves could end up having profound changes in how humans deal with each other — and the rest of society as a whole.