It’s been said that the AI revolution will do to the middle-class what the 19th century industrial revolution did to the working class and we are already seeing aspects of this in the worrying drop-off in graduate employment over the last couple of years.
We can’t stop this process, so we have to prepare for it and try to at least shape it.
The fact that those with the privilege of a good education are at least as vulnerable as the less privileged might possibly mean that AI’s evolution will be more controllable. That will depend on whether we can evolve consciously and co-intelligently with AI.
Many people worry about AI and robots replacing human work. But what is more likely is that AI will “divide the best from the rest”.
What I mean by this phrase is that “the best” will evolve co-intelligently with AI, becoming superhuman in capability, productivity and influence over others. They will delegate authority to agentic AI to build businesses and other organisations with minimal human resource, and create powerful roles for themselves with large financial rewards.
The “rest” may end up cognitively diminished, distracted and ever more dependent on manipulative algorithms and shortcuts for just about everything. We have been seeing evidence of this over the last decade through the mental health deterioration of young people, often attributed to social media and technology addiction.
So rather than humans being replaced by robots, it's likely that many humans will become robot-like. They will develop many of the attributes of robots, unwittingly surrendering to the seductive and addictive technologies we adore, and that undo our capacity to think.
In the most dystopian vision, humanity will lose its place at the top of the evolutionary tree, becoming enslaved to a dominant AI. This is often called artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the Singularity. I think the extreme and simplified version of AGI is unlikely; but I also feel that it's an inexorable technocratic pathway that we've been seduced to follow for decades through very compelling innovations in media and technologies.
Actually, this type of thing was predicted with astonishing foresight by Aldous Huxley almost a century ago in his novel Brave New World. I’d recommend reading it, or re-reading it if you read it when you were younger. Alternatively, this two-minute read, written by Neil Postman summarises it brilliantly, explaining why Huxley had better foresight than Orwell’s alternative dystopian vision of “1984”.
Anyway, to avoid or to slow down this dark and divisive evolutionary pathway for our species, there are some things we can do. We don’t necessarily need any new policies, we just need to pursue existing policies in social justice, cybersecurity and environmental protection more vigorously. The Europeans are ahead of both the US and the UK in policymaking and enforcement in some of these areas.
Much of that is outside my sphere of influence, but in my domain, we must rethink education in ways that help all young people access, wrestle and shape AI for their benefit. We should certainly not be avoiding AI in education.
