Beer Goggles #4 - Artificial Identity
Robot in human clothing.
The rapid progress made in Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the past few years has been staggering. In the past year alone video generation AI has gone from having a distorted and borderline abstract quality (as seen in this rendering of Will Smith eating spaghetti), to crisp and only slighlty reminiscent of the uncanny valley such as those produced by Open AI’s Sora.
For many people it seems as though this technology has come out of nowhere and is quickly becoming an important tool as both corporations and governments scramble to keep up in terms of their capability and legislation.
The idea has divided many a room, as some view it as a great step forward and others are more fearful over the potential loss of their job or in extreme cases the end of humanity. While some of this is reasonable, I believe there is a deeper underlying fear that prefaces all the dystopian horror. To explore this, we need to take a look at the modern system for global trade.
The current global economy exists on a model based around the idea of comparative advantage. Whereby a country chooses to specialise in goods and services that it is more efficient at producing, and then purchases those it is not from other countries. For example, if one country has a more optimum climate for growing apples over another, they would then focus on their apple cider industry and export this to countries that have a less favourable climate for apple production.
Today we see comparative advantage occur in a slightly different context. Products are designed by high-skill workers in one country (generally in the West), and then manufactured at low cost in another country (generally the East) that has cheap labour, poor worker safety standards and in some cases anti-union laws.
This is an interesting development, as having a low cost of labour is not a naturally occurring phenomenon and neither is the presence of wealthy investors or highly educated university graduates. Therefore, you could reasonably conclude that the respective traits of these economies are not fixed and could be turned on their head by economic shocks, like the introduction of AI.
When you take this into consideration perhaps people’s fear towards AI is less about their future employment status and more about the future displacement of their identity. For many people, how they make a living is a key aspect of their identity and sense of purpose. So when this begins to be challenged and the future is uncertain you can see why people start to get a bit uncomfortable.
Though it is not the first time in history that a new technology has threatened the livelihood and identity of a group of people; and just like then we will adapt and learn new ways to forge ahead. In the future it won’t be so much about who has the answers, and instead who can ask the right questions.
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