Why AI will never actually supplant humans in the workforce.

Yes, AI is eliminating jobs the same way many technologies have throughout time — nothing new there. But the economy is run by humans, for humans, and as humans we prefer to work with other humans. 

My vision of the future includes AI, intelligences far superior to what we have now and ones with access to do sweeping amounts of work accross all industries. At that time, the greatest need will be for people to manage the AIs. Their qualifications will be far beyond what we have now, but they will have skills, actual competencies that will enable them to herd, train, police and inspire the artificial intelligences in their care. 

AI managers of the future will NOT be programmers or data scientists. That would be overkill, both economically and practically. Rather, they will be ordinary AI conversant people — normal people. They will just know how to navigate the AI ecosphere of tools. It really will not be so different than finding someone competent in Microsoft Office tools in yesterday's workplace. In fact, that world of the future will have a lot of parallels to our world of the past, albeit somewhat accelerated. 

The utopia that today's business investors are imagining of an AI universe is to me absurd. They are racing to pour out their fortunes into an inevitable bubble with dreams of grandeur that have no basis in reality. They don't know what they don't know, and they are inexplicably betting all their hopes on the unknown unknown. Most of us call that desparation or irresponsible gambling. 

No, once the bubble pops, and industry realizes they have to make good on their investments, all this AI power will be reduced to office tools (for the most part). AI developers will be needed for custom applications (because humans are never satisfied with the status quo). I am sure the types of jobs in the future will be somewhat redefined from what they are now, and everyone will have to be retrained, but I also believe AI wil accelerate their retraining and job placement. 

So don't give in to the doom and gloom or the radical vision of a distopian society — it will eventually just be more of the same…but different. 

~Tom/*