Don't Wait

One of the technologies that the advance of generative automated systems (otherwise known as "generative artificial intelligence") has created some enthusiasm about, at least in parts of the technology sphere is "Autonomous Agents." Put simply, an autonomous agent is a system that can act to achieve one or more goals set for it without needing continuous supervision from a person, and has a certain ability to learn from its actions and feedback; adjusting its subsequent actions accordingly. These may not rise to the level of artificial general intelligence, but one could imagine them as expert systems.

I was reading an article on the expected future benefits of such systems and I noted that any discussion of the effects on employment were conspicuously absent. And this is something that's only going to become more important over time, considering that dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts are looking for "absolute airtight language that there will be no automation or semi-automation," at the ports. In any event, during the ensuing conversation, my interlocutor sought to tie this back to earlier periods of technological change saying: "The individuals who understood and prepared for the changes were the ones who adapted and thrived. This will be a challenge that, as a society, we’ll need to address, and hopefully, we can learn from past experiences to improve our approach moving forward."

Hope, however, is not a strategy. And neither is asking individuals to correctly guess what the future is going to look like, even a year from now. Technology corporations often consider the exact details of their progress towards goals to be business secrets, and to expect people to understand which jobs will be viable going forward and which ones will wither and die is unrealistic.

One of the enduring problems that the United States labors under is the general lack of unity of the populace. It's valid to make the point that American Individualism has lead to quite a bit of progress and invention, but it's also lead to people who fall behind being, as often as not, left out to dry by fellow Americans who attitude might best be summed up as "better them than me." As the ability of technology to do work that currently requires people advances, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem. Waiting to find out if it's going to depress the overall need for labor is not a workable plan; that threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The last thing that we need is to be in a position where companies are rushing to implement widespread automation in order to slash their labor costs before large sections of their customer bases find themselves unemployed and without viable prospects. A situation where it takes literal generations for labor demand to rebound will not be pretty.

So the time to start looking at the future of labor is now. Someone has to get started on this. And, as I well understand, when one looks in the mirror, "someone" is looking back at them. I have no idea what needs to be done. But I guess I'd better start finding out. I don't know when or even if genuine autonomous agents are going to arrive. But society needs to be ready before they do.