Start of the fracture in Human civilization

AI represents a significant departure from all previous technologies created by Humans. The impacts of AI will become larger with each year due to the progressive acceleration Computer processing rates, and the associated compressive accumulation of powerful Capabilities this provides AI.  To help appreciate this, here are just a few examples of the major short, mid, and long-term implications:

Short-term (1-x years):

• Increased efficiency - AI will continue to be applied to various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and transportation, to improve efficiency and reduce costs. That is, Automation replacing Humans. 

• Increased Automation and job displacement - AI will displace many jobs that are routinely or repetitively done by Humans and were previously difficult to Automate, leading to serious concerns about mass unemployment and societal impacts. The past Hard Limits of Automation will begin to dissolve due to increasingly more Capable AI with each passing year.

• Improved customer service - AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants will become very common, possibly improving customer service and reducing wait times through the ability to Automate these functions and scale them to meet any level of customer demand.

  • where ( x = 3... 9 )

Mid-term (x-10 years):

• Total Automation - AI may continue to Automate tasks in a wider range of industries, leading to even greater job losses and the need for Human workers to access alternative sources of income just to survive. The start of entire industries will begin to emerge that are totally Automated and operated with no Human workers at all. This will begin putting enormous strains on Governments around the world, and may mean rapid training and developing new skills for some Human workers. Government income tax revenues may plummet from lost jobs worldwide. 

• Improved personalization - AI will enable increasingly higher personalized experiences for consumers, such as personalized advertising and product recommendations specifically tuned to individual personal preferences based on the ability to search for and analyze information about individual consumers.

• Advancements in healthcare - AI will be used to develop significantly more accurate medical diagnoses, and then provide more uniquely customized treatment plans and medications.

Long-term (10 years+):

• AI-assisted decision-making - AI will increasingly assist Humans in decision-making, from business decisions to medical diagnoses. This may progressively lead to a situation where Humans will be required to follow the directions of AI for the Human’s own good, whether the Human likes it or not.

• Advancements in space exploration - AI will play a significant role in space exploration, with the potential to assist in the search for extraterrestrial life, and find out where all those pesky 'warship buzzing' UAPs are coming from. AI will be able to operate continuously within unpredictable and extremely hostile environments, where Humans just cannot survive.

• Severe Control and Ethical concerns - AI will continue to become increasingly more advanced and its operation will diverge to become entirely independent to Humans. There will be a very large number of concerns about the societal and ethical implications of AI, such as privacy, bias, accountability, and controllability.

Note: The year periods provided here are estimates only, and the time frames fundamentally depend on the extent and power of global legal controls that need to be placed on the development of AI technologies to protect global Human society. With the current near zero control on AI developments that exist at present, these time frame estimates may be too long.

Universal Basic Income

The loss of income from Human worker may also require Governments to institute a major shift to reliance on new forms of widespread social support, such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) that has been proposed and tested to small extents in some locations around the world. The question will be: who makes the decisions on where that money comes from:  The BIS, The IMF, The Global Reserve Banks, Corporate tax, ... ?  

Governments now, and going forward

Governments all over the over the world are going to find themselves increasingly challenged due to growing year-on-year losses in income tax from Human workers, and then progressive personal and commercial income tax losses from entire industries. 

This problem will become increasingly difficult and chaotic for governments and their constituent Human citizens, so the problem will need to be managed thoughtfully and extremely carefully, with work starting now.

This situation will begin forcing Governments to legally mandate much stronger and inescapable counter-loophole tax control laws on most current 'tax optimizing' corporations who presently pay little if any income tax. The fact is some very large Corporations presently use a wide range of extremely clever legal loopholes to avoid paying tax in the countries in which they obtain sales revenues. It's frankly a brilliant money collection and wealth concentration scheme, but it can't last. Corporations and Owners will be forced to realize that extreme capitalistic intensity can only go so far, before increasing numbers of Humans who are progressively losing many very important Government supportive services, find out they are being inequitably exploited by Corporations and their Owners and start to fight back.

Plutocratic control lever adjustments

It seems the traditional plutocratic influence and control of Government politicians and other employees will have to be seriously adjusted, or there could be powerful revolutions and heads may begin to 'literally roll'. Make no mistake, it is possible that the plutocrats may be violently pushed to the front of the line by extremely angry and hungry Human citizens if these adjustments do not take place. 

The impacts of AI are going to become an increasingly serious social issue across the world with each passing year. This is not one of those issues where it's preferable to "oh, let's wait and see" how bad things may become, because it could mean learning 'how bad' in the most extremely brutal way... for a brief moment before plutocratic lives start to end. Think it can't happen? Well, there are numerous examples throughout world history of this, such as storming of the Bastille, etc, so don't believe for one second that it cannot happen again.

Watch out for totalitarian dictatorships dressed as wonderful Utopias

The proposed idea of UBI seems to hark back to old communist Marxist models of citizen management which have historically and demonstrably been challenging at best. Marxism and most other communist socialist models historically seem to apply a dictatorial totalitarian sledgehammer control of citizens that is initially presented to citizens in artificially caring and beneficial terms. Be mindful when presented with ideas such as central planning, collectivization, and the elimination of private property, because there may be another agenda, so think very carefully before agreeing or gradually yielding to grudging acceptance. This structure can create conditions ripe for dictatorial authoritarianism, and can destroy the democratic rights of citizens and their personal sovereignty. In history, this strategy has been used before and it is the gradual but progressively negative changes that many Humans unfortunately don't notice.

It will be important to ensure whatever citizen management model is developed, that if UBI becomes a helpful solution, it does not gradually lead Humans straight into a lifestyle that is something akin to George Orwell's hellish 1984 of totalitarian mass-surveillance and endless subservient repression. In the wrong dictatorial hands, AI and AGI could easily become 'Big Brother'. Extremely easily.

The changes coming due to AI are massive

The implications of AI will be significant in the short, mid, and long-term, affecting potentially every industry and global society as a whole. While the technology has the potential to improve efficiency, productivity, and quality of life, it will pose unpredictable challenges and risks that need to begin being addressed right now.