After AI, the flood – The Health Care Blog

By Kim Bellard

I must admit that I have moved away from the writing of AI lately. So much things happen, so quickly, that I cannot follow. Do not ask me how GPT-5 differs from GPT-4, or what Gemini does against Genie 3 does. I know that Microsoft really wants, really that I use Copilot, but so far, I do not bite. Deepmind against Deepseek? Is the anthropic AI French, or is it Mistral? I’m just happy that there are younger and smarter people who pay special attention to all of this.

However, I am very concerned about the place where the AI revolution leads us, and we drive it or just for the journey. In Fast businessSebastion Buck, co-founder of the “Future Design Company” Enso, offers a great attitude about the AI revolution:

The scary news is: we have to rethink everything.

The exciting news is: we can rethink everything.

He continues by explaining:

Technical revolutions create time windows where new social standards are created and where institutions and infrastructure are redesigned. This window of time will influence daily life in a bad way, how people find dates, to find out if children write trials, to which jobs require applications, to the way people travel in cities and obtain health diagnostics.

Each of them is design decisions, not natural results. Who can make these decisions? Each company, organization and community that plans if – and how – to adopt AI. Which almost certainly includes you. Congratulations, you are now part of the conception of a revolution.

I want to choose a particular area where I hope that we will rethink intentionally, rather than in a normal way to short views, leaving: jobs and wealth.

It has become widely accepted that relocation has led to the disappearance of American manufacturing and its blue -class blue collar work solidly in the past 30 years. There is real to that, but automation was probably more a factor – and it was Before AI and the more versatile robots today. More specifically, today’s AI and robots do not only come in manufacturing, but roughly in all sectors.

Former transport secretary Pete Buttigieg warned:

Economic implications are those which, in my opinion, could be the most disruptive, the fastest. We are talking about entire categories of jobs, where – not in 30 or 40 years, but in three or four – half of the entry -level jobs may not be there. It will be a bit like what I experienced when I was a child in the industrial midwest when the automation trade sucked a lot of automotive jobs in the 90s – but ten times, perhaps a hundred times more disruptive.

Mr. Buttigieg is not an expert in AI, but Erik Brynjolfsson, principal researcher at the Stanford’s Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, is. Asked about these comments, he said Morning edition: “Yes, it is on site. We see huge advances in basic technology and very little attention is paid to the way we can adapt our economy and be ready for these changes.”

You can look, for example, to the major layoffs of the technological sector in recent times. Natasha Singer, writing The New York TimesReports on the way in which computer graduates have gone from the expectation of the starting salaries of the six years to work at Chipotle (and wait for Chipotle to automate all these jobs). The Federal Bank of the New York Reserve says that unemployment for IT and computer engineering majors is better than majors in anthropology, but surprisingly, worse than all other majors.

And don’t just feel sorry for technology workers. Neil Irwin d’Axios warns: “In the next slowdown in the labor market – whether it is already to start or years – there may well be a bloodbath for millions of workers whose jobs can be supplanted by artificial intelligence.” He quotes the governor of the Federal Reserve Lisa Cook: “AI is ready to reshape our labor market, which could in turn affect our notion of maximum employment or our estimate of the natural unemployment rate.”

In other words, you haven’t seen anything yet.

While manufacturing had a blow in the United States in the past thirty years, technology has exploded. Most of the largest and profitable companies in the world are technological companies, and most of the richest people in the world have obtained their wealth of technology. They are, on the whole, those who invest the most in AI – the most likely to benefit from it.

Professor Brynjolfsson is concerned about the way we will manage the transition to an AI economy:

The ideal is that you find ways to compensate for people and manage a transition. Sad to say that with trade, we did not do a very good job. Many people have been left behind. It would be a disaster if we made a similar error with technology, [which] It will also create huge amounts of wealth, but it will not affect everyone uniformly. And we have to make sure that people manage this transition.

“Catastrophe” indeed. And I’m afraid it happens.

We know that the CEO ratios to workers have skyrocketed in the past 40 years. We know that the concentration of wealth in the United States is also at unprecedented levels. And we know that social mobility – the American dream of children who does better than their parents, than anyone can do it – has stalled and is actually lower than in many of our countries. AI can solve them, or worsen them, well, worse.

It’s exciting to think about all the things that AI will do for us. We will be able to do old things better / faster / cheaper, and to do new things that we can hardly dream of now. With him, we should live in a post-space / abundance society. But that does not mean that we all benefit from it, and certainly not all also benefit from it.

Professor Brynjolfsson hits the nail on the head:

I am optimistic about the potential to create much more wealth and productivity. I think we are going to have much higher productivity growth. At the same time, there is no guarantee that all wealth and productivity will be shared evenly. We invest so much in the management of capacities for hundreds of billions of dollars and we invest very little in the reflection on the way in which we ensure that this leads to a largely shared prosperity. This should be the agenda for the coming years.

So, if you do not think of social protection programs, universal basic income (UBI), baby’s obligations, etc., as well as, exactly, we want humans spending their days to do, start to think. As Mr. Buck suggests, start to conceive of the AI revolution that we should wish.

Kim is a former Emarketing leader in a major blues plan, editor Dye.ioand now a regular THCB contributor