Work might become optional?
By Ankit Gajjar ·
Imagine a day you wake up and can choose to work or engage in activities not traditionally considered 'work.'
Complete time freedom for everyone.
That is what I think is likely to happen within the next 2-3 decades. It may sound impossible, but think about it: if AI takes care of most tasks and jobs, if not all.
What's left for humans to do results in insanely reduced weekly work hours.
Let's hypothesize two extreme scenarios.
1. Once AI becomes good at teaching itself, it then rebuilds or improves everything around us at a much faster rate. Things that have taken millions of human hours, AI can do faster and better.
The speed of progress becomes just a question of how soon we want to see a decade of progress in one year or less.
Robots will make absurd amounts of progress in every scene of manufacturing and logistics, medicine, the food chain, domestic jobs, driving people around, and many more things.
Incredible! At this point, humans should have the option to live without exchanging so much time, without a reduction in remuneration.
2. Everyone can get so much done in a short time, which could also trigger a human-driven desire for more than ever, instead of slowing down and finding activities that truly bring joy. Activities that may still be hard but don't feel like work.
Greed and boredom are probably the only factors left that keep society running; global-scale marketing brainwashing would be the medium to keep the movement going.
This is just hypothetical scenario I keep running in my head.
Both extreme situations have to start when AI is at its peak, and society will reset and reframe the entire meaning of work.
What do you think of these hypotheses?
By the way, I saw a cool video on the progress of a hand module's ability to pick up objects without pre-programming, done at Google's DeepMind Robotics Lab on YouTube. Literally, just natural language prompts.
If you wake up one day when you can absolutely choose to work on things you always wanted to, what would that look like?
I would love to travel, see robotics and quantum computer labs, and build physical bots using AI to help others.
Pushing technology to become good is extremely hard, but it is a good challenge for our generation to contribute to together.