Innovation always signals the withering away of the present and the rise of the future. While many hark back to a golden past where life was supposedly simple and one could find meaning in ‘enough’, reality shows a relentless human pursuit for more: more productivity, more growth, and more knowledge. This drive is fundamental to Homo sapiens, tracing back to our journey from the African savanna across all continents over the last 285,000 years. During this long period, the very character of our species has undergone significant changes, and today we dream of colonizing other planets. It appears now, that the same evolutionary impulse has led to something unprecedented: the creation of a new ‘species’, born not from nature, but from our own ingenuity. It would be a serious mistake to consider Artificial Intelligence as merely a new and highly sophisticated technology and not a potential new species in the making. The word ‘intelligence’ has always been ascribed to living beings, while technology is the result of applying this intelligence to solve real-world problems. This article examines the impact of AI on the job market from two perspectives: AI as only a technology and AI as a potential new species, currently under human oversight.
AI as a Technology
The word Intelligence comes from the Latin word “intelligere” which is a verb, meaning, “to understand” or “comprehend”. Etymologically, this verb is composed of two components, namely inter (“between”) and legere (“to choose”). Therefore, an intelligent living creature can take decision when confronted with multiple alternatives. The word Artificial is self-explanatory:- instead of a living thing, a machine is endowed with intelligence.
W. Brian Arthur (Arthur, 2007) in his article “The Structure of Invention” defined technology as possessing “a purpose, a combination of components, an architecture, and embodies a base principle that exploits some base phenomenon. We could therefore define an invention to correspond to a significant change in any one of these”. This definition of any technology does not ascribe any choice making capability to the technology itself. Currently, AI excels at making optimal choices primarily in well-defined, structured environments where the possible options are limited (a fixed spectrum of choices) and the criteria for selecting the best option can be statistically derived from vast quantities of historical data (e.g., classification and prediction tasks). This reliance on structure and available data confines an AI tool’s competency to the limits of its memory capacity, rather than demonstrating true intelligence. The Large Language Model (LLM) that provides the technological foundation of current AI tools has its own limitations in identifying truth that human intelligence is capable of determining. S. Johnson & D. Hyland-Wood in their paper on LLM [reference] have highlighted this well- “(LLM models) can sometimes produce output that goes very rapidly from amazing to badly wrong. As an example, we asked ChatGPT 4, 4o and o1-preview to identify the canonical academic references for LLM orchestration. Most of the resulting academic paper suggested by the LLMs did not exist, the links to the papers did not resolve, and the conferences and journals cited do not list the papers. They were bullshit, appearing plausible but untrue”. These observations are important but do not diminish the significant impact of current form of AI in the job market. It is quite likely that in another 10 years AI may start possessing “intelligence”.
John Schumpeter in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” floated the idea of “creative destruction” as the driving force of capitalism. According to Schumpeter, capitalist entrepreneurs can sustain their market dominance only by inventing new product, new and more efficient production process and seeking new market. The success in any of this endeavor can materialize if and only if the old system meets its destruction. Notwithstanding Schumpeter’s definitive and mostly accepted view about dynamics of post- industrial -revolution market economy, it would be a travesty of history, if a long series of innovations that shaped the humanity since the invention of “ stone chopping tool” 1.8-2 million years ago, is credited exclusively to market driven capitalism. In other words, AI is a result of history and not a product of capitalism per se.
Metamorphosis of AI to a new Species:
That evolution has reached its final goal with the arrival of Homo sapiens will be the most unscientific claim by any human being. The concept of God, an almighty humanistic creator of universe, is only a projection of this human thought process, “Après moi le déluge”. Irrespective of language, social norms and economic structure, every human being will fight to the end to avoid metamorphosis of AI to a digital species. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, in a Ted Talk underlined the danger that is likely to materialize, if AI is allowed autonomy. He argued that “autonomy is very obviously a threshold over which we increase risk in our society. .. If you allow the model to independently self-improve, update its own code, explore an environment without oversight, and, you know, without a human in control to change how it operates, that would obviously be more dangerous.”
Isaac Asimov formulated “Three Laws of Robotics” to ensure that AI always remain under the strict control of human (see Appendix). In the real world, it would be impossible to enforce these laws across the globe, especially across different developers, companies, and nations.