A massive artificial intelligence boom could displace the skilled upper class.Old ideas that computers cant do certain human actions are being disproven.The AI job takeovercould be a bigger problem because its benefits will go to the few who own the technology.The rise of artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate jobs once considered impossible to automate.One series of papers by Oxford researchers ranks jobs by their estimated susceptibility to automation. Among those most rated likely to vanishbecause they involve work that AI can increasingly accomplish less expensivelyare real estate brokers, insurance claims adjusters and sports referees.Could anything good come of mass unemployment'History tells us that when technology squeezes people out of jobs, they revolt. Industrialization in 19th-century England, for example, gave rise to Luddite activism.Unfortunately, history also suggests that protests of the marginalized dont solve the underlying problem. The British Army suppressed the Luddites; the government passed laws to protect factory equipment and industrialization marched on. As Marx went on to theorize, in a capitalist society, the government is co-opted by the wealthy classes.What happens, though, when that skilled upper class is itself put out of a job' Thats the question that mass AI-based unemployment would pose. What would happen when well-educated lawyers, journalists, bureaucrats, corporate managers and other creative-class knowledge workers cant find work' Could the rise of AI lead to a white-collar rebellion'Extremely capable AIWhen I was a Ph.D. student in the mid-1990s working in a subfield of AI known as computer visionthe automated processing of imageryI used to think that the grand challenge of the field was to develop software that could take an arbitrary image and output a text description of it.At the time, computers couldnt tell if a photo contained a human face or a bowl of macaroni and cheese.It was a problem I didnt think I would live to see solved.Just two decades later, a combination of advances in hardware, big data, parallel processing and neural networks have made impressive headway. Not only are AI systems increasingly able to describe image content, they are gaining significant footholds in translating between languages, grading essays and composing music. Modern AI systems are already conducting financial analysis, writing news articles and identifying legal precedents.Old ideas that computers cant do certain human thingsbe creative, express emotion, empathizeare being tossed out one by one. A visceral way to feel AIs looming approach to human intelligence is to view the output from Googles DeepDream, in which a trained neural network run in reverse produces eerie, dream-like images that seem genuinely creative and uncomfortably human.Its hard to overstate what this and related advances portend. Even technologists who made fortunes paving the way for the AI future have begun to sound an alarm. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, whose self-driving car technology includes plenty of AI, has called AI humanitys biggest existential threat.Bill Gates seems to think the crisis is self-evident, saying he doesnt understand why some people are not concerned. And if futurist Ray Kurzweil is right, by 2045, computer intelligence will match or exceed human abilities in every waywhat he calls the singularity.Professionals plotting revolutionBut the job apocalypse might have a silver lining. The Luddites of the 1800s were unsuccessful for a number of reasons: They were politically marginal. They were not well-organized.They misdiagnosed the problem as being either about the technology or their employers. And, at least in some tellings, they had little public support.In contrast, those involved in a white-collar movement would have strong ties to influential people. They would organize effectively. They would understand the larger problem as an imperfect economic system whose pathologies technology merely amplifies. And, they would have the rhetorical skills to draw the sympathy of the publicwho are likely to be themselves jobless, too.Unlike other worker revolts, a white-collar rebellion could move the levers of power so as to uproot the underlying problem: a politico-economic system that concentrates wealth, increases inequality, protects corporations from public accountability and fails to separate wealth and state.I expect the AI job takeover to pose a problem primarily because its benefits will go to the few who own the technology, while all the harm will fall on the rest of us. It is a political problem, not a technological one.In my view, technology amplifies the inequities of capitalism. What AI will do is to turn nearly everyone into displaced workers, even some who were previously among the elite.SEE ALSO:Facebook's AI boss: 'In terms of general intelligence, we're not even close to a rat'Join the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: 6 airline industry secrets that will help you fly like a pro
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