There has been increased discussion lately about the AI system and about how many people may lose their jobs because of the development of this technology, which is being heavily marketed to the point that it terrifies many who claim to ignore it and just say, “Really? How long will it take to impact me? How dangerous is it for my current job?” Between illusion and certainty arise many questions and fears of the specter of unemployment that has come to threaten many.
This raised a lot of questions for me; I thought to myself, let this machine do the boring, monotonous work, and let us humans devote ourselves to our creativity and self-development so that it can be a tool in our service to make our lives easier and better. But is it really being developed to that end? Since I personally belong to the optimistic category of people, I began to look at the issue from a different angle. Why is this technology seen as a threat rather than a way to improve our lives and as a tool we use like every other tool? It took a little time before I was faced with the cruel answer that it is venture capitalists and profiteers who decide the objective of this technology and not my humanism; it does not matter how many people will lose their job or how much money and years they have invested in their education and building their experience, what matters is to raise the profit margin, even at the expense of reducing quality by a certain percentage. The irony is that during the technological revolution, those who were most affected by the loss of material and moral values were the Human Sciences graduates, so we see today that Applied Sciences graduates such as medicine, pharmacy, and law are under the same threat. But will humanity bear a fair margin of error with these specializations? The saying goes, “If a doctor makes a mistake, he kills one person, but if an engineer makes a mistake, he may kill hundreds.”
However, my point of view may not seem one hundred percent accurate, as those who lavish money on investing in the development of artificial intelligence are not only venture capitalists and investors, but today, some governments are paying the big bucks to develop it. Let us take the United States of America, for example, where it paid approximately $9.8 billion on artificial intelligence research and development between 2015 and 2021, according to research I conducted using ChatGPT. But did you know, dear reader, that an American employee who spends almost five years of his life paying accumulated student loan debts pays between 10% and 37% of his salary to the government, which invests $9.8 billion from taxpayers’ money to make the latter unemployed?
In conclusion, I am not an anti-user of this technology, and I have no clear vision of it; I invite everyone, especially decision-makers and strategists, to think again, as the ultimate goal of any tool is to improve human life and conditions and elevate them, not marginalize them and eliminate their creativity and creation. Do not let profit be the only goal, “for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”