More leisure, a more balanced workplace and a universal AI tax....

AI will change work for everyone, educated and uneducated.  You just can't make better decisions than a machine that has all the information, loves complexity and never gets tired.  The revolution this time will add information searching, report writing, media copy and management of complex processes to the automation of physical tasks and instantaneous calculations that we already have.

Yuval Noah Harari, the AI commentator portrays this as a potential disaster where we will create a huge number of unemployable people - those who through the inability to adapt to a new labour market simply do not have any work of any kind.  He makes the point this huge group of people would have very little economic or political power, and be hugely economically disadvantaged.  I disagree.

It seems to me that one of the principal benefits of our social evolution has been to create leisure.  In the beginning we had none.  Everything wanted to eat us.  Even agriculture when it came was never ending labour to survive.  Then we got feudal lords who gave us one day a week off from slaving for them so we could spend it working for ourselves.  Finally, through the industrial revolution and automation, the concept of weekends, holiday took root, through to recent discussions of a 4 day week.

So, isn't it possible, and indeed likely that people could also enjoy more leisure, and fill it as they choose?  What exactly would be the difference between the people who have less work because of AI, and those people who retire while they still have 30 even 40 years of healthy life ahead of them?  The key factor will be income, and where it comes from.  But maybe more leisure is a good thing.

AI will help deliver a balanaced workplace, finally, because according to some, there are things that AI will never be able to do.   AI will never  have a sense of humour, can't empathise, and is not able to come up with truly original ideas.

(Even as I write this I find myself doubting that something we hear with our ears, process with our mind against what we learned was funny, or empathetic as a child and through our every day experiences, and how a new idea is just all the ingredients put together in a new way by a human mind again juggling facts, ideas, memories, data  .....)

Anyway, I'm certainly not making my case if I just remind us of all the impregnable fortresses of human exceptionalism that have fallen already, so let me just run with the proposition that a machine that can be emotionally intelligent is still 25 years away.  So, 25 very good years to come for those of us who are emotionally intelligent, and who able to effectively interface the incredible power of AI so that it doesn't drive the rest of us to distraction.  Sisters - take advantage!  AI could be the wonderful moment when we finally achieve a more balanced workplace based on paying skills not really much appreciated in the last 100 years .

And so to the money.  We are already in a place, even before the advent of AI, where technology companies are simply not paying enough tax, anywhere.  Discussions are advanced to create  a global minimum tax rate, and to ensure that wherever a company makes revenue, it pays tax to contribute to the society of which it is a part, and which infrastructure it is using.  Now add to this that the raw material of AI advancement is universal data.  AI needs to capture everything; all the data in the internet and anything else it can find, calculate or make up.  AI companies would love if we were all wearing monitors that would feed AI constant data about our health, moods, location, etc etc, for free.   But the output of AI, using this free universal data, will be paid for by all of us, as customers

Is AI the only sector where the raw material is free?  Solar energy perhaps?  Its almost like the matrix whiere humans were seen as batteries providing energy.  For AI companies, we are the providers of data which we give for free, and then we pay for the service.  As it stands there is a basic cost to the AI owning companies that is simply absent.  If we do not do something about this, their future profits will be extraordinary, which is why their share price is so high currently.  This is why I suggest that we need a separate global tax rate, for companies that mine the global resource of universal data.   At least with a higher global tax income for governments, options open up for pensions, or a unviersal basic income, which will help fund more leisure, or the less work that is the result of AI.