Governmental Responsibility for AI

Could AI cause a revision of capitalism? I think so, but not in the way that one might think. When a person can't create better work than an AI system or robot, what is left of the wage earning system that we live in? Nothing that we would currently recognize. I advocate for a joint government/industry commission to help workers transition before the job loss ever occurs, and to even out the future path we take towards AGI affecting our livelihoods.

Elon Musk has proposed a Universal High Income. For a relatively small minority of workers, that would be fine. Who wants to break their back for a minimum wage income, or work a job they hate, just to barely get by after all? But we can't allow ourselves to fall into the thinking that everyone would be happy. And even then, minimum wage and those who despise their role, would likely be more than happy for the opportunity to do something different. A sense of purpose and accomplishment is important, even if only marginally tied to income.

If I were a researcher on the subject of Human and AI interface, I'd want to know exactly how many people would be okay with not working and instead receiving a Universal High Income as Musk has proposed. I would also want to know how many would not be okay with it.

AI skeptics have concerns that this technology could be the end of humankind. While I think that is certainly possible, though unlikely, I think there is only one distinct possibility that has to be analyzed in this context, prior to any other concern: foreign competition. If we don't beat China to AGI, we are in for a rude awakening of just how stable or unstable our freedom is. This has to be done first.

Second, and this is only relevant after China is beat to the punch and that AGI is found to be safe, is to ask what kind of world can we truly build? I attribute to Musk, again, the idea that calculators (whole buildings of people running interest rate calculations manually) were a job that was feared to be lost during the advent of the computer. It WAS lost, but the jobs were simply migrated to other parts of the economy. The world that came after, with digital computers, created wealth on a scale never imagined before.

But here's my concern at the moment, and this is not just to complain at Musk as I don't think any AI or political leaders have addressed it sufficiently: what is the plan if AI takes more jobs than it can create, at least in the short term? Offering a Universal High Income and free healthcare is a great starting point. But that just isn't enough.

To start, government intervention for the Universal High Income would be needed, certainly. I don't see companies simply paying people to sit around and/or be doing nothing profitable for the firm. But what else can be done? Job re-training.

That's the crux of my argument. There needs to be an entire branch of the government ready and able to retrain workers into jobs at the very the moment we know what jobs will be needed for the future. The anxiety of losing one's job and not having a guaranteed source of income (Universal High Income is only an idea that's been floated around, to my knowledge) is massive and it will only get worse as the future unfolds.

Ideally, a government department in conjunction with top companies would work together with employees to train them on work flows that are currently relevant, or will be needed, in the near future. This needs to have the infrastructure built out now, not when riots or civil unrest have come to a point where disaster is prone to happening.

Leaving workers almost completely in the dark on this is a massive blind spot that billionaire tech moguls don't seem to fully comprehend. No one seems to have a good answer on what jobs will be around, and I don't expect anyone to be able to know the future. Especially with the uncertainty even our leaders are experiencing. Either way, though, jobs will be destroyed and new jobs will open up. We just need to have our workforce prepared to capitalize on these new AI systems to cement firmly that the USA is the world leader in AI, and always will be.