Surviving the Reign of AI

As technology progresses, more and more jobs are being taken away by machines due to the nature of automation.

This has almost always been the case ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and has recently been accentuated due to the popularization of AI and machine learning in the realm of information technology.

As of the time of writing, even intellectually sophisticated activities such as fine arts, music, programming, literature, video production, and others are on the verge of being overtaken by the ingenuity of robotic minds. Their qualities are not as yet sufficiently intricate as to be able to replace the majority of highly skilled human professionals, but they do continually improve themselves and their cost-effectiveness is already great enough to undermine the necessity of hiring and training some of the entry-level practitioners.

We are living in an age of endless uncertainty, where no fixed skillset seems to endow an individual with the ability to become a unique part of one's profession by means of serving the role of an irreplaceable expert. As machines successfully take over more and more skills which used to be reserved for mankind before, an individual gets more and more frequently lost in the vast ocean of possibilities, constantly searching for random fragments of knowledge to learn and trying to adapt him/herself to the ever-changing environment. Preserving one's original identity is becoming more of a luxury, and one has no choice but relentlessly keep running on top of a treadmill which is designed to lead nowhere but barely sustain one's role as a parrot of the society's collective consciousness.

Where is individuality in today's world? As technology keeps replacing more and more portions of the pool of human intellect, where should we find a key to unlock a door which will lead us to yet another secret garden of humanity which is yet to be tainted by the tyranny of mechanization?

In order to find out a clue to this fundamental inquiry, we must first contemplate upon the meaning of individual uniqueness in our modern world as well as the problems which have been impairing it, and then try to define the most ideal future scenario to which mankind should aim to propagate itself.

First of all, let us ignore the presence of today's AI technologies for now and investigate the nature of life and society as a whole, for AI is just the tip of an iceberg compared to the overall trend which has already been exhibited by the modern world for centuries. It roughly began with the early Industrial Revolution, and proceeded to illuminate its own presence through the course of globalization.

(Background)

The reason why a person usually wants to be "unique" in one's field of expertise is that it is an indicator of a relatively high degree of competence when it comes to the irreplaceability of one's role as a member of the society. And it used to be far easier (as long as sufficient resources were given) back in the pre-industrial and pre-global era than it is today, due to a reason which I am about to illustrate below.

If you are a sandwich chef in a small village which is isolated from the rest of the world, it can be assumed that it is not so hard for you to stay as the most highly demanded creator of sandwiches in the entire community of people with whom you are interacting on a daily basis. Let's say that there are about ten thousand villagers in total, and let's suppose that they all rely on each other internally for most of their basic needs because there is hardly any direct exchange of resources between the village and the rest of the world. As long as you are the most skilled sandwich chef among these ten thousand villagers, you can assure that you are and will always be the most demanded/loved provider of sandwiches within your local community. You do not need to care if there are other sandwich experts outside of your village who are more competent than you are, since you have your own "homeground advantage" which prevents you from being replaced by those outsiders. Most villagers will rather eat your sandwiches than try to venture outside of the village just to taste other sandwiches which might taste better than yours (The amount of effort it takes to travel is likely to discourage such an endeavor).

Once your village opens itself up and gets engaged in active commerce with the external world, however, everything changes. You are no longer guaranteed to remain as a competent chef because there are probably countless others outside of your village who are better at making sandwiches than you are. Suddenly you find yourself having to compete with not only your ten thousand fellow villagers, but also with billions of strangers living all across the globe.

This is one of the side effects of globalization; you no longer possess the home advantage you used to have back in those days when people's domain of production and consumption was more or less confined to their own local area of residence due to physical limitations. Nowadays we have railroads, freeways, international trade routes, high-speed internet which is capable of selling digital products (intellectual properties) all over the world at the speed of light, and other protocols which connect all of us together more closely than ever, yet also open up the gateway to the eventual widening of the gap between the ones who succeeded in dominating the entire global market and ones who did not. Over time, what is bound to occur is the eventual death of all businesses which fail to become the absolute top performers in their fields of specialization with respect to the whole world. That is, monopoly is expected to take over.

So, what should be a solution to this? We may consider creating our own local communities which are deliberately limited in scope in terms of the way in which they exchange resources, thereby effectively generating "isolated bubbles" which operate in a manner that is similar to those of small medieval kingdoms. However, such a plan is more or less just arbitrary, as it is quite evident that the only method through which a deliberately self-isolating community can promote itself is to appeal to people who want to reinforce their egos by distancing themselves from the rest of the world, as well as to convince them that they ought to choose the particular communities that we are promoting instead of their own.

In order to resolve these tricky issues, we ought to investigate the root of the problem we are facing by means of an example. Let's imagine that you are an artist whose job is to draw concept arts for a living.

(1) Uniqueness

You are an artist who wants to be as unique as possible, since it is the way to ensure that you stay as a demanded individual in the job market. And in order to fulfill this necessity, you constantly try to endow yourself with creative endeavors, for the hope of proving to the rest of the world that you are somebody special - somebody who owns a secret cabinet of sparkling ideas which distinguish themselves from all the rest which are supposedly "boring and less creative". You hate cliché, and assume that anyone who is highly skilled in reproducing the most commercially viable piece of mainstream art are imposters hiding behind an illusion of creativity, as opposed to your "real creativity".

The problem is that, from a purely economic point of view, those who produce cliché are probably the most fitting individuals when it comes to the dynamics of supply and demand (due to the way in which the world of businesses governs itself). Yet it is also true that, if every artist aspires to seek the most optimal method of generating revenue, arts will be dominated by mediocrity.

But sure, there is the world of pure arts which distinguishes itself from the so-called "commercial arts". There are people who are determined to establish and insist upon their own non-mainstream definitions of "creativity", regardless of how the world of business views them. Most of them are hungry artists who hardly manage to make money off of their arts, but a few of them somehow succeed in promoting their own abstract values and achieving some kind of commercial success out of them (possibly with the help of famous acquaintances, bored investors, enormous marketing budget, etc). Even this abstract form of success, however, depends on its own subtle formula which is more or less cliché in terms of being optimized to appeal to a specific class of people in the most efficient way (That is, a class of people who think they are different from others and thus feel the necessity to physically differentiate themselves by buying luxury goods and labelling themselves with fancy keywords).

Therefore, whether it is even possible to become a "unique and creative" individual in today's world which comprises billions of people, the vast majority of whom are able to instantly share their products of ingenuity via a single digital marketplace by means of the internet and social media, is highly questionable.

(2) Practicality

Even if you somehow manage to become a truly unique artist, the problem of commercial viability will forever haunt you. The market does not necessarily reward all types of uniqueness; it only rewards those of specific kinds which are deemed optimal for attracting either a wide range of audiences, or at least a niche audience in a sufficiently competitive fashion (Also, you've got to make them pay). In order to satisfy all these criteria, you must sacrifice part of your uniqueness. This more or less leads to the eventual convergence of creative strategies when it comes to practical business applications.

Yet, some people may persistently exclaim that it is possible to be "creative" while also being pragmatic - perhaps not easy, but not impossible either. And yes, finding a nice little intersection between these two domains of reasoning is something worth a shot, up until the point at which one realizes that there are millions of other people who are thinking in the same exactly way.

The root of the problem lies on the fact that one is trying to do something that others are not doing. Finding such a thing is more or less an illusion in most cases (unless one has recently discovered a brand new field of intellectual endeavors), especially in saturated areas of the industry such as fine arts, music, fiction writing, and game development.

(Corollary)

So, what should be a solution to all this? Will there ever be a way out of this airtight chamber of hopelessness, despite the impression that further competition will hardly be of any use for an ambitious individual except for the purpose of barely keeping up with the status quo?

First of all, when we say that something is "unique", we are essentially saying that it is unique within the context of the whole world. Also when we say that something is "practical", what we are basically saying is that it is practical within the context of the whole world. It all depends on the context, and every qualitative aspect of things is defined in relation to a particular frame of reference rather than being absolutely evaluable on its own.

With this in mind, one can suppose that a fictional context in which a fairly small group of people implicitly agree with one another to share a set of imaginary narratives (i.e. ones which do not pertain to the society's usual "supply and demand" logic) has the potential to revive a tiny isolated community in which the members are endowed with much higher opportunities of becoming unique/useful individuals - that is, a fictional world with its own library of knowledge, its own definition of what is practical or impractical, and so forth.

Such a fictional world will work as a splitting force which draws boundaries upon the surface of our world and lets each of the resulting imaginary regions obtain the privilege to possess its own incontaminable hue. This will prevent the entire universe from plunging into a single point of convergence in terms of innovation, capital, and other characteristics of success, by diversifying the value system in subtle ways.

The problem of how to create an imaginary context, though, is another major challenge to overcome. A fully out-of-reality fiction, such as a fantasy novel, does indeed possess its own artistic value which may even manifest signs of commercial success, yet it is not likely to be taken seriously because it does not pertain to the necessities of our daily life. So what we really need in order to be able to serve the aforementioned purpose is to figure out how to invent a fictional worldview which is only partially detached from reality - that is, a set of narratives that are quite abstract and therefore differentiate themselves from what we directly experience on a daily basis, yet are not so absurd as to let ourselves instantly tell that they are part of an elaborate fiction.

One may say that this mode of reasoning can be interpreted as more or less a "religion", yet my personal persumption is that I should avoid attaching myself to such a fixed vocabulary to describe the concept because such a concise means of explanation is likely to summon a great deal of prejudice and minunderstanding.