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AI Arms Race continues to heat up from the big tech companies that are down, and as AI is fused to almost every industry, an inevitable panic is beginning to be set. When AI “exchanges” us, how can we make money, whether we are a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, a financial analyst, or a writer?
Take a deep breath. Don’t panic. If we look a little closer, this is a logical extension of what we saw in so many information age automation in the past decades, if not in the industrial age of the past centuries. The original technical delusion was Luddites, a class of British workers who opposed the increase in the use of mechanized looms and knitted frames. These were the artisans who creatively and physically gave the craft the lifeline, claiming that those who now run these new machines are taking away their livelihoods. Does it sound familiar?
These protests rose to levels of violence, including the destruction of the factories in which these machines were operated. Whatever the short-term catharsis this provided Luddites, it was not a very effective long-term strategy. Mechanized looms and their descendants won in the market for money and ideas.
Current alternatives misunderstand both humans and machines
The very human problems of existential crisis facing machine-based integration are not stories as old as time, but are inevitably repeated in every era when humans have come to rely on some kind of technology. In the early 2000s, Amazon introduced its first robot with its own version of Luddites to automate warehouse operations.
There were probably even protests against the wheels by those who knew who they knew, perhaps by those who made a living carrying items behind them, but that was simply undocumented. They will not win by moving backwards only by understanding how they will adapt to the current tides that are constantly moving forward.
This latest phase of AI development is the latest and perhaps the last stage of fully automated information age, effectively ending that information age and bringing the next new. It may seem strange and dangerous now, but what we need is a kind of small, large-scale adaptation that we have always had to do.
As the development of artificial intelligence grows exponentially, the economy counters the fact that it has historically worked by being highly labor-driven, and the uncertainty that arose when labor burdens shifted from almost entirely human to algorithms in the form of AI agents. Whether it was physical, physical, intellectual or creative, labor, labor, it has always been labor that served as a monetization trajectory.
No one has yet proposed a viable solution for what will make this labour center successful. A common alternative that is often proposed is the universal basic income, which completely negates the monetization workforce. However, this was not practical except for very small pilots. This is because it does not fully consider the hierarchy and priorities driven by the innate human desire for incentives.
Enter the intelligence economy
Looking at the confusion caused by past technological revolutions, we tend to focus on the technology itself, rather than how it was unfolding and who was unfolding. The fear about these technologies is not actually about the technology itself, but the way economically powerful people were able to exploit these technologies, and how they were able to utilize the creative labor they were imitating to create greater economic imbalances.
As a means of protection against this outcome, we propose a different kind of UBI: Universal Baseline Intelligence. The same is happening with the pattern of ideas-based creation, as mechanization in the industrial age took the patterns of human physical creation, merely repeating them on the assembly line. Intelligence is used and deserves to be monetized. You need to make sure that the appropriate value is due to being entered into these new systems. It’s not necessarily on the output, not just because it’s right and fair, but because it generates full buy-in across the industry to maintain this new economy.
In building a new economy with new priorities, individuals need to ensure that they retain the right to use and monetization of their intellectual property. Of all the available means to do this, decentralization offers perhaps the easiest and best means of securing ownership, with the unparalleled ability to monetize any kind of intellectual “asset” in the digital space. Personal AI agents that learn from human experience must also prioritize their highly human-owned and able to generate continuous revenue opportunities.
There is still time to become a transformative change that works for many, rather than the dangerous disruption that enriches the minority at the expense of many. As we move into the post-agent post-WEB world and from attention-based to intention-driven systems, we need solutions that ensure that humans remain at the heart of intelligence. If we can do that, the fear around AI will turn into hopes of freeing humanity from the useless chain of labor, towards a more enlightened form of intellectual value creation.
