Beyond Jobs: Rethinking Wealth and Work in the Age of AI

Yuval Noah Harari has long been sounding the alarm about the impact of AI on human employability. This clip, shared by Reid Hoffman, captures his concerns eloquently. I share Harari’s sense of unease—and I’d like to offer a perspective on the issue that’s perhaps uncommon, or more likely unpopular, for reasons that will become clear as you read on.

I suspect the way in which society will adopt and realign itself to the rapid replacement of many aspects of human intellect by machines—be it driving a car, composing a paper on a new scientific discovery, or diagnosing an illness—will not simply involve continuously rediscovering new jobs to complement this new (and seemingly dystopian) phase in our journey towards automation. Of course, that will happen in the midterm. But what will ultimately unfold is a reformation of how wealth is generated and distributed across society.

My hunch is that this transformation will come via a sequence of mini revolutions of the political variety—perhaps even involving sticks and stones in some instances. Just think about it for a moment: what happens when you're unemployed, with no capacity to live a decent life, and discover that eight out of ten of your acquaintances share your plight? What we mustn’t forget is that humans will retain the advantage of physical and social prowess for at least another century, and they will use it to force social change when things become particularly unbearable.

Joblessness, and the resulting inability of individuals to move about and enjoy life, will build up sociopolitical pressure. This pressure will, from time to time, reach breaking points—forcing significant policy changes, such as the adoption of prosperity-based remuneration for societies, over and above the continued freedom to use one’s ingenuity, sell one’s skills, and engage in free enterprise.

The rational model that will emerge for sharing wealth won’t be top-down—though things like a UBI might serve as stepping stones—but rather, it will become ubiquitous policy for private enterprises to include memorandums that cover a broad range of stakeholders and considerations, all of which contribute to their growth, directly or indirectly. Stakeholders such as the founders, directors, employees, their families and dependents, their neighbours, their governments, their charities, the environment, and the citizens of their counties of registration or countries at large. This isn’t a strange idea—we’ve already seen nascent forms of such attitudes toward private enterprise for several decades in some northern European countries. They seem to be doing reasonably well.

What I’d like to highlight is that this problem isn’t about AI or AI-powered companies—or their ‘enemies’ for that matter—fretting over how the world will fare once they become super-rich and/or all-powerful, controlling vast swaths of the world’s resources through their systems. “Poor ordinary chaps—no jobs left for them. What shall we do? Let’s put in some checks and balances into our tech to retain a few jobs.” No.

The real point is, I don’t think we’ll ‘win’ this ‘battle’ with AI by trying to stymie it—that would be a fool’s errand. Instead, we will learn to circumvent it’s negative social repercussions by exploiting it to its fullest and harnessing it to lead easier, more prosperous lives as a whole—accepting realities and expediting social reform along the way. Just as the Industrial Revolution brought about entirely new fields, policies, and protections, so will advanced AI. It will trigger a second revolution in the meaning of private enterprise within the broader context of society and AI advancement.

Just as it's natural today to expect time off, provident funds or healthy working conditions at a job, it will become equally natural to expect rising community wealth—even from the productions of super-lightweight, super-rich and/or super-influential companies—through mandatory obligations built into their memorandums and fundamental philosophies of success.

As to the exact mechanisms that will evolve to offset the disparities caused by AI—that’s up for discussion. But at its core, the shift must include a reformation of what we mean by “private enterprise” and how nations define and distribute their wealth. One might be up in arms about this notion, branded a neo-communist or worse—but if, as many predict, AI does bring about such a rapid disruption, the changes in our approach to productivity and enterprise will come faster and more easily than we expect.