mekka okereke 
Essay: Thoughts about the impacts of AI and mobile robotics
Bias: I'm from the US so this will be from a US worker perspective.
Basically every day I see a new take on how the visions of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, etc. for AI and robotics will impact workers. What I'm writing about here is people speaking like this is something new.
I propose that they are NOT new changes. It is instead another step on the path we've been on for a long time. To be clear, if the economics of these technologies is favorable to business, they will have real impacts. But conceptually they are incremental.
Steps like:
- The move from local workers to a global worker pool in blue collar jobs in food harvesting, back-office food services, or home construction.
- The move from local workers to fixed point robotics in domestic manufacturing such as the automotive, aerospace, or electronics.
- The move from domestic production to global production for entire industries like steel, computer chips, or clothing.
- The move from local workers to a global worker pool in white collar jobs in customer service, information technology, or document processing.
Steps along this path, like the handful of examples above, have completely changed the nature of work for so many domestic workers.
Job and career impacts from complete job loss, concentration of local worker jobs to supervision of production instead of generation of production, mass population relocation, and more.
So the discussions around AI and mobile robotics sound like new problems but to me they seem like more of the same. For many domestic workers they are so far down that path that AI and mobile robotics may not have as much an impact in their industry. Companies have already shown they how much, or how little in this case, they value domestic workers.
For the global worker pool, in for example India, routine task based roles may be be impacted a greater amount. Domestic companies moved to them for cost saving, so if AI provides more cost savings they could drop them for AI like they dropped domestic workers for them. But from the domestic worker point of view, their high-level role of work being outsourced to a "lower cost geography" or "lower cost AI" may feel similar.
In the US, people's identity in society is often built around work, job, and career. A person's production is how people claim belonging in the economy, prove worth. But these steps have always chipped away at that social construct. Production has been disassociated from domestic workers, and society has done a poor job adapting from the brief post World War II period's thought patterns around work.
This path has also broken the junior/apprentice construct. US companies are chronically short sighted, only chasing better numbers this quarter. They need the judgement of senior people to manage quality of production for the machines, global workforce, or AI. However, they are not providing juniors with opportunities to build that judgement.
Case after case, AI and mobile robotics impacts are not new, they are incremental. They are going to continue eroding what little is left of the social contract, continue concentrating wealth, power, and control in a smaller and smaller group, and they are NOT going create some new system to help workers.
The billionaire class has completed the largest transfer of wealth in history from the public. They are accelerating their siphoning of wealth from the state. The billionaire class and governments have always had the choice of doing what is good. We know what choices they have made.
So, we already know the answer of what will happen to workers with AI and mobile robotics. Production will go up, but workers will become ever more disconnected from that output. They will have less control, shrinking opportunity, be closer to economic disaster, and feel more disconnected from a society that is built around an outdated model of belonging and status tied to production.
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