Yesterday Elon Musk, talking with the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunaksaid that one of the effects of artificial intelligence will be a world without work, a world in which we will no longer have to work, because machines will do it for us, and in which we will all receive “a universal maximum income”.
We will be paid, and a lot, for doing nothing.
For fifty years, every time a new technology appears, the imminent end of the work has been predicted. Yet typewriters and calculators did not eliminate secretaries and accountants; the assembly line and then robots in factories did not eliminate workers (they reduced them, yes); and the web has not decreased overall employment nor have smartphones and social networks, if anything they have opened the way to new jobs. To give just one example, shops have not disappeared because there is the possibility of buying online.
If we look at things from a broader perspective, we see that the global unemployment rate has remained stable from 1991, the year the web was born, to 2022, which marked the debut of Chat GPT. It was this last fact, as is known, that relaunched enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, but also fears: it will lead to the end of the world, or in any case, the end of work, Musk now says.
I’m waiting to meet someone who would prefer to have a tooth extracted by an artificial intelligence rather than by a dentist; or that he will have his car repaired by a robot instead of a mechanic. As in the past, jobs will disappear and others will arise.
Among those who will disappear, many think of journalists. It is said that Chat GPT is able to write an article better than a journalist: this is not true. Think about what is happening these days in Gaza, where journalists risk their lives every moment to tell us the truth and dismantle the propaganda lies. No artificial intelligence could do that. However, a journalist who knows how to use the web, social media and artificial intelligence can now do his job much better than before.