Time is running out for humans: I was laid off, and my job was replaced by AI

How do I feel? I feel like being laid off is just the tip of the iceberg: Time is running out for humans in this economy.

For the past three years, I wrote about self-development, relationships, and spirituality for a media organization with tens of millions of website clicks per month. The problem? AI can write faster and cheaper, and feed Google’s algorithms more adroitly, than my merely human mind and creativity.

About a year ago, the company switched most of our writers to AI-assisted roles. In this capacity, they worked together with AI to write hybrid articles. Then the style of articles changed: less profound and exploratory; more concise, clickbaity, and algorithmically inclined.

There’s no doubt about it: Technology offers many benefits, and we can’t turn back the clock. But we can become conscious. We can form human connections and work opportunities that endure the digital onslaught.

The advance of killer robots or big AI systems that will control us all can seem like more of a Hollywood movie script than reality, at least for now. For those who really do expect the Terminator to walk down American streets and start blasting one of these days, it can also come to seem like an inevitability. Whether waved off as a fantasy or accepted as an unavoidable black pill, both options underestimate how much disruption AI is rapidly causing at the fundamental economic level.

Machine learning is already ending lives domestically; it’s just primarily doing so at the vocational and income level. For the middle class Midwesterner hooked on opioids, the elderly, or those trapped on the gig economy’s hamster wheel, the impact has been somewhat muted so far, but the end result of AI run rampant is clear. The eventual prospect of a population dependent on government handouts or universal basic income is decidedly dystopian, even if it ends up being accompanied by secular anthems like “Imagine” about “no possessions” and a “brotherhood of man.” One man’s “brotherhood” is another man’s tyrannical regime.

Unchecked AI advancement across industries makes widespread techno-feudalism more likely by the day. Without the ability to earn income from private enterprise, government control becomes all but absolute. Cynical, streamlined technocracy isn’t a future scenario out of science fiction; it’s a daily reality that is intensifying by the day.

In 2016, AI goods and services generated about $644 million in revenue worldwide. By this year, the market for AI grew to $184 billion and is projected to reach over $820 billion by 2030. According to AI researcher and consultant Gil Press, around 36 million jobs in the United States are subject to a “high exposure” to AI and replacement in the upcoming decades.

In the 2018 video game Detroit: Become Human, developed by Quantic Dream, the player navigates life in a future where AI-powered cyborgs have become commonplace in the professional and personal lives of citizens. The player’s choices throughout the game lead to one of 85 different outcomes as the narrative presents cyborgs becoming self-aware and beginning to fight for their rights in a clumsy parallel to the U.S. civil rights movement.

“This is a miserable, dark version of a future Detroit where androids are so omnipresent that they’re old news, sold in chain stores for the price of a discount mobile phone,” writes Lucy O’Brien.

“Little details from the sidelines tell the story of a burst tech bubble, like basements filled to the brim with discarded models or a street performer advertising the fact he is playing ‘human music.’”

But while the game presents a future in which AI is sold to society as a way to make life easier for ordinary people and to staff rank-and-file professions (including police work), the reality seems far less gradualist. AI will simply begin to run more and more industries and professions from the top down. What starts as an AI-run logistics system for truckers will one day become trucks driven by AI. What starts as website content written by AI will one day become a website run entirely by AI. As more and more work is delegated to AI, it’s inevitable that one will have to trace farther and farther back to find a human link in the chain.

As Unnanu AI-run hiring agency noted several weeks ago:

In recent developments that have sent ripples through the tech industry, two giants, Google and Tesla, have made headlines with their decisions to lay off more employees. This move comes at a pivotal moment when both companies are aggressively pushing their investments in artificial intelligence (AI), signaling a significant shift in their operational and strategic priorities. The layoffs, while surprising to many, can be seen as part of a broader realignment within the tech sector, which is increasingly looking towards AI as the next frontier of innovation and competition.

The irony is that even the industries themselves, which are causing writers like me to lose jobs, are also cutting their own jobs in order to adjust to the new artificially generated environment. The new world is moving fast, and the digital egregore is rapidly accommodating to the brave new world of mechanized content.

Machine learning is just that. And make no mistake: The machines are learning. Our online and offline actions and behaviors are their manna from the digital heavens. They feast on them and become smarter, more agile, more informed, more nuanced. Even gaps in input or dead zones provide information about the lack of information. It’s not so much a matter of machines and AI taking over everything as it is a matter of machines and AI taking over almost everything to the extent that the difference becomes almost negligible.

There’s no doubt about it: Technology offers many benefits, and we can’t turn back the clock. But we can become conscious. We can form human connections and work opportunities that endure the digital onslaught. We can refuse to put a price on the human soul. Remaining human forever has become the last great mission of humanity.