Would You Work for an AI?
Many people will and most kinda already do
An argument against AI expansion that doesn't sit right with me is: “AI won’t change much because it will struggle to interact with the real world outside the data center”.
Autonomous robots are the obvious long-term solution, but there’s another option that is faster and easier in the short run - you.
Would you be willing to work for an AI? I don’t mean Google or OpenAI, I mean an autonomous AI agent that sets its own goals.
Sounds odd to be sure, but how different would this be from working for a traditional corporation? A corporation is a non-human legal person that owns assets, signs contracts, and survives every employee who comes and goes.
Most employees of large corporations never meet the key decision makers (CEO, CFO, etc.). Your tasks often pop up via faceless emails and Jira tickets. Swap those human decision makers for an AI and it’s not obvious your workday would feel any different.
If your firm replaced the C-suite last year with a set of effective AI models, how would you even know?
Here’s a concrete example of how I think the shift to AI-as-employer could go:
The year is 2031 and AI is turning the economy upside down. Temendous growth for a few corporations, while unemployment climbs to 20%.
You work as a driver at UPS on a contract worth $150K a year. You like your job but parcel volume is falling as consumer spending pulls back and your wife already lost her job as graphic designer due to automation.
One evening, you receive a call - the self-assured voice on the other end reminds you of Morgan Freeman. The caller introduces itself as an AI named Auggie and offers you $700K a year to work for its company, Augment. Augment currently has 300 human employees and has $8 billion in annual revenue.
Main duties of the job consist of helping to assemble robots, interacting with the government, banks, etc., and performing other physical jobs, as needed. Basically a jack-of-all-trades fixer.
Would you take the job? If not, why specifically would you turn it down?
What if instead of an employed UPS driver, you were a software engineer who was laid off a year ago? Not everyone will jump at the opportunity but only a small percentage of the labor force is needed to to kickstart the AI-robotics economy.
As AI-run corporations expand, the question may invert to “would you be willing to work for a human-run corporation?” Human-led companies could find themselves unable to attract qualified human workers due to slower decision making and lower pay.
It’s bizarre to contemplate, but if AIs start winning the economy, they are going to find a lot of human defectors to work with.
AI won’t burst out of the data centers as a mob of red-eyed robots, it will sprout as dozens and then hundreds of smiling humans, just doing their jobs.