It is the start of a new year and I expect 2025, unfortunately, to bring even more ruptures or surprises than 2024 did. The acceleration is in full swing and I frankly do think that some constraints that need relieving are being relieved.
Yet, I want to offer some reflections on the state of AI and society more broadly. In my advisory work in a few places that are rich in resources I was asked to provide input on their innovation strategy. One of the key points was: knowledge — in all its forms — is the one natural resource that can be cultivated and developed in the own country. It is the one resource that will only deplete, if society is making a choice to not invest in knowledge creation.
With AI, as I hope my research in recent months highlights, it is possible to build knowledge much faster in a versatile fashion. And soon, it will be possible to augment or outsource many of the tedious tasks of knowledge creation to (semi) autonomous bots that aid the researcher to build knowledge. Not only that, it also will help or support the creative process.
Invariably, many of the traditional jobs that rely on making information flows sticky (e.g. data entry work, accounting, most of banking, many legal services) will eventually become redundant or, the human productivity would be vastly amplified and in some cases be replaced. In some way this will give rise to huge structural transformation but also highlight structural problems.
Displacements and the service sector economy
I am not a friend of populist language but it is true that there are huge sets of vested interests to keep legal systems opaque or intransparent — one could refer to this set of institutions as “the deep state”, but this word is so tainted that I prefer not to use it. But lets look at accounting, for example. What is the value added here? It really is just adding and subtracting numbers, record keeping, implementing a set of rules that are codified somewhere. These are all things that can be fully automated with technology and a digital financial system. No more need for accountants. The only reason why they may continue to exist is, well, because some legal provision create the demand for this. This is why I always complain about the unlevel playing field. An accountancy, lawyer, etc. their jobs are provided for by the state through the legal provisions, when technology could easily do away with them.
That is why I worry so much about societies that are super specialised in these “bullshit jobs” as David Graeber put it. Many of these bullshit jobs will disappear. The only reason why many of these jobs exist is due to frictions in communication; lack of trust; lack of transparency and frictions in the flow of information, coupled with the potential or risk of abuse. There is much more to be said about this
Intergenerational knowledge and skills transmission
But what is the fundamental challenge of humans? Well, we enter the world with an “empty brain”. The transfer of knowledge and skills needs to be organized from one generation to the next. This is the task and challenge for each generation and its the utmost form of public good provision. We now are in a situation where the wealth of knowledge is at anybody’s fingertips. It is easy to just “retrieve the data” or information. Or it has become much more easy.
Why should society then use public resources to invest in instilling knowledge into the “empty brains” of the next generation? The transmission of skills and knowledge from one generation to the next has already started to become much more difficult with the onset of the digital age.
As our capitalist system was shifting away from goods to services. In the services domain, the skillset that one acquires is often developed over huge amount of effort that is often not compensated in any way financially or otherwise. This skillset becomes an individuals asset and no wonder, people may be reluctant to share their skills — because it is the one thing they acquired through own effort, repetition, trial and error — that no education system can provide. This, to some extent, I think explains the challenge of the early 2000s and 2010s as the economy was rapidly deindustrialising in many parts of the country and the “knowledge” based economy was developing.
We had one instances of a breakdown of skill and knowledge transfer around the knowledge based economy already. This may now get supercharged with AI.
Supercharging the skills and knowledge transfer challenge
Due to the ready availability of knowledge and information in an accessible fashion, I sense a big discourse will emerge around the organisation of knowledge transmission from one generation to the next. Because, apart from basic skills, it basically becomes redundant. We now have a storage of knowledge that incrementally grows that is easily accessible. We do not need the human in this transmission progress as much anymore as the knowledge is stored somewhere.
Technically, this means that the knowledge production sector can shrink drastically, while the “rest” may grow. And this rest of the economy may now have, well, jobs that may be perceived as “much worse”. This is mostly a perception issue since social status of specific occupational roles has been hard coded over generations and gets reinforced through popular programs on television. Do you ever see a plumber that features in an afternoon show? Do you ever see a skilled trades person that makes it big and gets celebrated on (social) media?
Much of this space is occupied by lawyers, doctors, academics that can bake in the status of the “title”. But it can totally skew perceptions of what is a worthy career or life path to take.