One great hope I have for AI – rehumanizing the economic world (Yes, another post about AI – sorry.)

Artificial Intelligence is inspiring strong feelings in many of us. Some people have AI-philia, some AI-phobia. I think my position could be best described by the David Bowie Lyric “I am torn between the light and dark, where others see their targets divine symmetry”. (From Bowie’s second best song, “Quicksand”.) I feel both extreme excitement at the possibilities, and fear of the threats. One of my most fervent hopes is that AI can address one of the ills of capitalism, the ‘tyranny of scale’. Capitalism is addicted to scale. This means that anyone or anything that can generate financial value at scale gets unreasonably rewarded. A corollary of this is that processes, factories, and jobs are designed and optimized with scale as their major concern. That means, for example, that even if it is much more compelling and rewarding for a worker to participate in the whole of something, they only get to do one tiny bit of the process repeatedly, thousands of times per day. Like take a bottle off a production line. Every technological innovation that came along, like machines and factories and trucks has served to exacerbate these scale effects. The movement known as Taylorism, where workers were measured to maximize efficiency, is a quintessential part of this. I remember reading a case study at business school about a car company (maybe Volvo) that experimented with moving from a classic production line to a series of bays. In a bay a small group of workers could be responsible for assembling a whole car together. My memory is weak, but I think that experiment wasn’t economically successful. I was wondering if AI might be able to be the first technology to reverse that trend, or at least help people feel a greater part of the whole. In two ways: 1. Possibly Virtual/ Augmented/ Mixed Reality + AI could be used to assist  workers visualizing the whole process/ product end to end. Both in terms of time (lifecycle of production and usage of the product) and space (the whole product in its ecosystem.) 2. Possibly AI + Robotics + 3D Printing etc. could be used to allow workers to be more efficient and productive at a smaller scale. (Although it could also be used the opposite way – a sort of AI-powered hyper-Taylorism.) Ultimately, how this whole AI thing plays out is down to us humans. If we just sit back and let it happen it could amplify the ills of capitalism, and bring some whole new ills of its own. If we design its development and use thoughtfully, perhaps it could rehumanize the economic world. #unthink #unask #unlearn #AI #Artificialintelligence