AI and the race to the edge of the cliff

Following the release and massive splash of ChatGPT, there's been a subsequent tidal wave of press and social media content focused on the seemingly endless applications of AI, the benefits, and the risks. Although the early warnings about AI and machines taking over the world seemed as far fetched as the plot of The Terminator film franchise, the most recent warnings, coming from scientists not screenwriters, seem far more prescient and hit closer to home. The Center for AI Safety (yeah, that's now a thing) issued this eye opening statement:

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

Generative AI fueled and trained by large language models (LLMs) resulted in an unprecedented step change in business automation, seemingly overnight. Automation certainly isn't new. When advanced technology brought mass automation to manufacturing, blue collar workers were negatively impacted, and management and shareholders benefited. More recently, automation has come to retail, in the form of self checkout options. I've watched grocery and big box stores slowly shift the ratio of cashiers to self checkout stations, and eventually hit critical mass.

To date, most automation has displaced the very people holding the corporate ladder steady for professionals to climb. Essentially lower paid resources doing highly repetitive tasks, but highly critical tasks to business operations, nevertheless. Now, the prospect of AI technology, pervasive throughout business-to-business and business-to-consumer software solutions, is coming for the white collars. Writers, editors, accountants, customer service representatives, software testers, buyers, and numerous other roles are at risk of extinction. Those closest to the bottom of the ladder will be yanked down first. The velocity of AI's impact is gaining momentum so it's only a matter of time before the C-Suite is directly impacted as well. But by the time AI comes for the senior-most decisions makers, will it be too late to course correct?

If the short-term plan is to automate and improve the work of professionals, what's the end game? As companies race to automate as much as possible, the myopic focus on maximizing shareholder value at the expense of all else will improve their own fortunes and 10 Ks while ignoring the fact that if all other corporations behave the same way, ultimately there will be no solvent consumers left if 90% of the global workforce is decimated.

So what happens when automation inevitably results in mass workforce obsolescence and critical mass of the global population can no longer earn a livable income? The companies that win the automation race for their industry may immediately find a wasteland of consumer destruction below the cliff's edge.

Let's hope corporate leaders have at least some perspective of the "greater good" beyond their financial statements. Now that the race is on, there's no calling people back to the starting line for a do-over. AI is a tremendous enabler of technological and scientific discovery, and a tool that will open up new worlds to many. If unchecked, we'll soon wish the Center for AI Safety issued more than a one-sentence warning, and worked harder at a practical, actionable framework for saving ourselves from, well, ourselves.