The Troubling Narrative of AI is Coming to Take Your Job

AI isn’t doing anything right now. Maybe one day, but not now. Certainly, AI isn’t seeking to take your livelihood. There’s someone with the wealth and power to make decisions who believes that leveraging AI will be cheaper or more productive than paying you. That person is going to take your job away.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s easy to say for someone who has the privilege of a fair number of hard-to-replace skills (not programming. Programmers, in the conventional sense, won’t exist in a decade, I think). For many people, AI will unleash their potential. What else is the computer of the Enterprise except ChatGPT on steroids? If we want that, we need this.

But that sentiment is privilege all over again. There are many people who have survival needs. They’re not interested in the minutiae and hair-splitting of whether or not AI will be a net good for civilization. We live in a reality where they need to eat, sleep, and live. We live in a society where they can only do those things if they convince someone with wealth to give them some of it.

All that to say, if you do lose your job “to an AI,” it is people making those decisions, not AI, and it’s those people we should appeal to or hold accountable for the decisions they make. Nothing will be gained by shaking our fist at the abstract concept of Artificial Intelligence.

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PS: I asked ChatGPT: “Please proofread this for grammatical, spelling or obvious factual errors:”