This was a fascinating article and I enjoyed seeing their summary of their research into how even current AI can impact the way people work, for the better. However, I can almost guarantee that most companies, especially the highly wealthy ones, won’t be using AI in the way the author suggests.
I’m going to speculate that we’ll start to see a bell curve, where small startups use AI to replace workers due to the cost of bringing on new team members, medium sized companies use it to augment their employees output, and large companies will layoff workers and replace them with AI; the latter of which is already happening.
Why?
Because the same pattern seems to be present when talking about company morality and ethics. While many smaller companies and startups tend to pledge to improving worker’s rights, shrinking the company’s carbon footprint, improving customer relations and/or increasing the quality of their products, they typically don’t have the capital to truly commit to these values.
Medium sized companies tend to have the capital to fully commit to the values laid out when they were smaller, while not yet being large enough to experience the full force of capitalistic greed.
Finally, large companies have the capital to maintain their stated values, but often discover that said values run contrary to those held by their shareholders and board of directors (that being that greed is good and seeking infinite growth). Additionally, many of those companies are reaching full market saturation (if they haven’t already achieved it) and find that they have to begin sacrificing their values in exchange for those dictated to them by their board of directors. The result is that they tend to be all talk, little action.
This was a fascinating article and I enjoyed seeing their summary of their research into how even current AI can impact the way people work, for the better. However, I can almost guarantee that most companies, especially the highly wealthy ones, won’t be using AI in the way the author suggests.
I’m going to speculate that we’ll start to see a bell curve, where small startups use AI to replace workers due to the cost of bringing on new team members, medium sized companies use it to augment their employees output, and large companies will layoff workers and replace them with AI; the latter of which is already happening.
Why?
Because the same pattern seems to be present when talking about company morality and ethics. While many smaller companies and startups tend to pledge to improving worker’s rights, shrinking the company’s carbon footprint, improving customer relations and/or increasing the quality of their products, they typically don’t have the capital to truly commit to these values.
Medium sized companies tend to have the capital to fully commit to the values laid out when they were smaller, while not yet being large enough to experience the full force of capitalistic greed.
Finally, large companies have the capital to maintain their stated values, but often discover that said values run contrary to those held by their shareholders and board of directors (that being that greed is good and seeking infinite growth). Additionally, many of those companies are reaching full market saturation (if they haven’t already achieved it) and find that they have to begin sacrificing their values in exchange for those dictated to them by their board of directors. The result is that they tend to be all talk, little action.