AI and the coming boom in demand for Human Intelligence
History teaches us that AI will increase, not decrease, the demand for human intelligence. Mostly so in skilled professions that are the most impacted by AI.
When intelligence becomes abundant, demand for it will explode. This is something we can easily see from history, and what is called Jevons Paradox: When a resource becomes more effective to use, and radically cheaper, demand paradoxically increases.
When electricity became cheap, we didn’t stick with replacing our means of lighting. We replaced heating, eventually food preparation. We invented radio, refrigeration and more new technologies than earlier thought possible, because we got abundant, cheap energy. When calculators became mainstream, mathematical knowledge didn’t lose its value, the value of it rose through its leveraged application.
The same thing will happen as intelligence becomes abundant with the entry of generative AI.
Doing things that were too small & costly before
The obvious case of what will happen: We’ll do the same things with fewer people and less resources. This is the focus of the current Zeitgeist, and what people with a static, unimaginative mindset believe will lead to mass unemployment by people displaced by AI.
Some displacement will inevitably happen, but the opportunities that arise in adjacent areas will be bigger than the displacement. The most obvious case, for software, is doing all the things that were previously inefficiencies, but far too expensive to do anything about. Consider any workflow today that is puzzled together by email, Excel-spreadsheets, or people doing repetitive tasks with small variability, but for which the payoff of automation has been lower than the cost of automation.
If the cost of producing software is reduced by just 20%, an immense number of new use-cases suddenly becomes economically viable. If you reduce the cost by 50% or even 90% (unlikely in the foreseeable future), the number of use-cases that can be dealt with has a veritable Cambrian explosion.
Consider previous technological shifts, the things that became economically viable, but this time, add the human intellectual bandwidth which is freed by AI, and we might see a boom the like of which we’ve never seen before.
Doing things that were too big or speculative before
On the opposite end of the status quo, endeavors that were previously too big, too resource intensive, or simply too speculative, become less so. This is the realm of the unknown unknows: new technologies that may seem like science fiction by our current standards.
If the timeline, resources, and cost of a moonshot-type project is reduced significantly, it becomes less of a moonshot, and, more feasible to start in the first place. The impact on this for technology, medicine, biotechnology and other deep-tech industries should not be underestimated. Be prepared for our impending sci-fi future.
Conclusion: humans will be more in demand, not less
Steve Jobs is attributed with the saying that “Personal computers are like bicycles for the mind”.
If that is the case, AI is like a personal rocketship for your brain: It shortens the path from idea to proven or disproven hypothesis. It reduces the drudgery in f’in around and finding out, so that we may find out sooner. Our intellect gets an amazing leverage in thinking about the big picture, while not having to memorize trivia to achieve the same outcome, when trivia with instant recall is at our fingertips.
This in turn, unlocks economic opportunities, small and massive, which are far greater than the opportunities we have today. The consequence is, the world will have a never ending demand for intelligence, both artificial and biological.