We all know that the world is going to change radically over the next few years and decades due to advances in AI.
AI is extending the scope and scale of technology and automation into pretty much every sphere of life. It is even accelerating the rate of change.
Needless to say that this has the potential to cause very serious disruptions to society.
It is true that making predictions about where we are heading as a society is notoriously hard. This battlefield is littered with the decaying remains of people who tried and failed. Only fools (like me!) dare to take this on…
So why am I doing it?
I believe it is still important to go through this exercise because we need realistic yet optimistic visions to keep us moving forward.
In the absence of realistic and optimistic visions, the gaping void gets filled by unrealistic or pessimistic or self-serving visions which ultimately hurt all of us, and we already have tons of that! Just open any newspaper or TV channel and you will be scared to leave the house, leave alone charge happily into the future!
So here is my attempt at providing one realistic yet optimistic vision, along with the potential problems created by it and possible strategies to help us solve them.
Note that this is not a “prediction” per se. It is more of one of many potential scenarios, with some non-trivial probability associated with it.
And there are many ways to slice and dice these plausible emerging scenarios. I will describe here just one slice of it, as it pertains to class hierarchy.
The “Company Hierarchy” meme
To explain this vision of the emerging future, I am going to start with a meme from gapingvoid.com called Company Hierarchy that had become popular a few years ago.
Company Hierarchy, from gapingvoid.com
In this picture, the (admittedly edgy and tongue-in-cheek, but quite useful) terms “Sociopaths”, “Clueless”, and “Losers” are used to describe the three layers of employees in a large company.
Here, “Sociopaths” corresponds to upper management, “Clueless” corresponds to middle management, and “Losers” corresponds to lower level employees.
(Of course, they could have used plain terms like “upper management”, “middle management” etc. but would it have gone viral then? 😊)
Anyway, irrespective of whether you are on board with this characterization when applied to large companies, I am sure you will agree that the picture actually looks a lot more appropriate when you use it to describe the class hierarchy in all of society.
When applied to all of society, the Sociopaths layer would correspond to the upper class (also known as the billionaire class these days), the Clueless layer would correspond to the middle class, and the Loser layer would correspond lower or working class.
So I am going to modify the picture accordingly. And I am also going to move society forward in time into our fast-emerging future, which will actually change the shape of the pyramid and add some very interesting nuances.
Let us take a look at this modified picture below.
Class hierarchy of the future
Class Hierarchy in Our Technology-Dominated Future (Image credit: Vin Bhalerao)
Here are the main characteristics of this picture of the emerging class hierarchy:
- At first glance, we still have something like a pyramid with the same three categories as the company hierarchy pyramid: the “Sociopaths”, the “Clueless”, and the “Losers”. But this is where the similarity ends.
- Since we are referring to the whole of society now instead of just a company, the labels above correspond to classes in society, i.e., the upper class, middle class, and lower class.
- The pyramid is “stretched” (depicted by the curved rather than straight lines). Kind of like how it would be if it was made of rubber and was stretched from the top. This deformation indicates that there could be a much wider disparity between the mega-rich upper classes and the poor working classes. This is pretty much how many societies already look these days.
- Not just that, but the absolute top of the pyramid appears to be actually separating from the rest of the pyramid, forming a droplet or a “bubble”. (I am using the word “bubble” deliberately since it demonstrates many of the characteristics of bubbles — disconnection from reality, a totally separate set of rules that apply within the bubble vs. outside of it, its unstable nature, the euphoria as well as anxiety experienced by people inside the bubble, how unreachable it looks for the people below, etc.)
- Thus, this picture shows the Sociopath class splitting into two: those who managed to achieve sufficient velocity to become airborne and get into the bubble, and those who failed to do so, but are still at the top of the pyramid. (Of course, they still occasionally get invited to parties where they get to rub shoulders with the real bubble people. More importantly, they get to take selfies with them, which they can then use to impress the Clueless and Losers below them in an awkward attempt at demonstrating their high-class status. 😊)
- The level in the middle is Clueless, corresponding to the (shrinking) middle class. The Clueless class won’t necessarily be middle managers as in the company hierarchy picture. Many of them will probably be individual contributors, but still able to command a higher status than the Losers due to their higher and more marketable skills.
- What skills? Well, they will mostly be technology skills. I believe that in the future, we will see the middle class consisting mostly of techies. (Techie is a generic term I will use for people involved in the tech industry in some form.)
- This is because of the well known trend of “software eating the world”, i.e., many other occupations are being converted into “techie” occupations. Technology allows many occupations to get automated, which pushes the people who do the actual work into unemployment, while redirecting their earnings to the techies who build and run the automation. We already see ample evidence of this too.
- A further nuance to the Clueless class is that it will split into three sub-layers: the “10X” techies at the top, the “1X” techies at the bottom, and AI (or more generally, automation and supporting software) in the middle. (Here, the terms 10X and 1X refer to the idea that, in many professions including technology, some people are able to perform at an order of magnitude higher level than others. One can also think of the distinction as those who innovate and build new AI systems and those who operate or maintain them.)
- The 10X and 1X people are called clueless in the sense that they spend most of their day dealing with technology: software, data, and processes, and so on, rather than the realities of the external world.
- The AI sub-layer in the middle will consist of smarter and smarter AIs. But, for a long time, they will continue to be really clueless, proclamations of sentience by Google engineers notwithstanding!
- And the AI / automation sub-layer will constantly keep expanding upwards well as downwards. At the upper level, it will make some of the 10X people rise into the Sociopath category, the proverbial clueless genius forced to become an evil genius! Some of the 10X people will become outdated in their areas of expertise, and hence fall down into the 1X level.
- In addition, as the AI expands downwards, it will force some of the 1X people to fall further down into the Losers class as a result.
- Losers will basically be the people who did not manage to acquire the requisite technical chops to get into the Clueless category. More and more, they will also include those who used to be in Clueless category, but got outdated or outsmarted by the AI.
- The Sociopath and Clueless will do fine economically, but the Losers will have serious difficulties.
Ok, so that’s a quick dystopian or “dark cloud” description of this vision of the future.
But I thought you said this wasn’t going to be a dystopian vision! What gives?
Well, it should also be clear that this type of a stretched pyramid with a bubble on top is not a sustainable situation. It, due to its own unstable configuration, can not last for very long.
How will it resolve itself?
If we don’t do anything and just let things play out, the resolution may be extremely painful.
But if we study this impending dark cloud carefully and put in place realistic strategies to create a silver lining around it, we can continue to make progress peacefully.
What’s the strategy?
As I have described before, thinking in terms of silver linings is one of the most important pillars of my way of thinking. It is important to look at dark clouds honestly and carefully, yet find or create, and then reach for, the silver lining.
I address that in my next post.
Photo by Simone Viani on Unsplash
