Is There An AI on the Plane?

Despite all the fervour surrounding the envisaged benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the technology seems to come with more warnings than cigarettes.

Based on the hyperbole which currently resonates around the media about the impact AI will have on everyone’s lives, it would seem it is as addictive as tobacco to its progenitors but how long will it be before we truly know of the dangers the technology represents to our livelihoods, health and wellbeing?

Where the industrial age replaced muscle power with steam power and mechanisation, the AI age has serious potential to replace intelligence with information and automation, leaving our own autonomy at the mercy of digital autonomy and burdening us with an ever reducing sense of agency and purpose.

At present, the list of professions pertained to be at risk of AI replacement includes almost everything which involves the processing of data, some form of quality assurance or anything which can be parameterised. Here, the potential impact of AI stretches from low-level data entry positions up to high-profile and high-salaried jobs such as traders, lawyers and accountants.

One should bear in mind that jobs beget jobs and all the professions related to high-profile positions (assistants, juniors, ancillary positions) may also eventually diminish or disappear completely, either through their own AI equivalents or the knock-on effect on income due to the reduction in human workers. After all, AI does not need coffee in the morning, a sandwich at lunch or a train driver to take them home after a day’s work.

AI is also coming for those in esteemed fields such as the medical industry and education. Jobs such as General Practitioners (GP), researchers, radiologists and anaesthesiologists are all on the list for potential AI replacement. Many GPs already use AI to provide basic information to patients and, given the current difficulty many across the world face in securing GP appointments within a reasonable timescale, the use of AI doctors will only increase to meet an ever-growing need.

AI has already infiltrated education, from the primary to the tertiary, with multiple reports of students utilising AI to complete homework or produce papers and theses. Even more alarming, and particularly ironic, are the recorded instances of teachers and tutors using AI to check and mark work – which in itself may be AI-generated - in an attempt to reduce their ever-increasing workloads.

Right now, many exist as the test bed for the replacement AI systems which will follow. Major companies are already forcing their staff to utilise the company’s internal AI systems to assist them with their work and in the process brazenly coercing the turkeys to vote for Christmas.

This all may seem a touch depressing and frightening but the real shock will lie in the speed of the coming transformation. The industrial age took time to build up steam (pun intended), AI adoption will come quickly and, unless sufficient safety nets are in place, brutally.

Mirroring the motives behind the industrial revolution, this coming change is ultimately fuelled by the notions of growth and productivity. What was once the exclusive yardstick for progress in Western societies has spread across the 21^st-century world to become the parameter by which the success of all countries, or more precisely their governments, are measured. AI is catnip to those who believe this is how life should be gauged. But how will growth function as a metric as productivity eventually plateaus with AI usage? If growth remains the goal by which everything is measured, who and what will be sacrificed in its name with AI at the helm?

So, what is the solution? From a position of privilege, the exponents of AI extol a future of re-skilling, innovation and entrepreneurship, as if everyone has the desire or ability to undertake any of these things in a way which can support them financially on a day-to-day basis. With wages continuing to stagnate and tax income diminishing as corporations seek ever more egregious ways to avoid paying the contributions needed to fund infrastructure, hospitals and schools, state pensions and ever-growing defence spending, there is little appetite from governments for measures such the implementation of a “living wage”.

Surely, now is the time for legislative safeguards to be put in place. In the face of AI replacing workers, it is essential that governments protect employees and unions from the whims of corporate AI policy and uphold the right to pursue fair employment. After all, governments and societies function on the backbone of taxable income from the workforce. As the number of jobs available on the market begins to increase, unemployment will undoubtedly rise and the social purse will be stretched to breaking point across the world. Unless something is done soon, there will be a disastrous knock-on effect for everything which is state-funded, from the payment of pensions to the maintenance of critical infrastructure.  

Yet, in a world already racked with plastic pollution, forever-chemicals and a diminishing commitment to achieving net-zero carbon output, asking for some form of mechanism to uphold corporate responsibility in their AI-powered world seems like the punchline to a horrid joke. Oh, the irony of a future with AI-powered job centres and state-run institutions which have fallen into the hands of corporations, bought cheaply with the tax money they worked so hard to not pay.

Yet, this could all be wrong - a worst case scenario which will never happen. Over time, AI may prove to be the solution for solving climate change and it may realise that CEOs and the wants of shareholders represent the real danger to the planet and humanity as we know it. We may end up in a utopia where our income is generated for us by our own personalised AI agents, allowing us to enjoy a world of leisure and pollution-free tourism for as long as our hearts desire.

Let’s just hope that someone on your holiday flight knows what they are doing when the AI pilot calls out and asks if there is a doctor on board.