Day 676: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: uncertain future

For @mariannewest in #freewrite

Human life has never been certain. That was in prehistoric times when cave bear or a smilodon could easily have a person for breakfast, in ancient times when once could easily become a salve or be born into slavery, in medieval times during religious wars, during the industrial revolution when people were losing their jobs to machines. With time passage, wars became more and more all-encompassing, more and more horrific, threatening to destroy the entire humanity.
In this century, however, humankind meets an entirely new challenge. This challenge comes from merging infotech with biotech, and from the totally new creature – AI. Up until now, intellect could not exist without consciousness, and consciousness in its best manifestation was in control of the intellect.

AI, on the other hand, doesn’t have any consciousness, at least so far. However, if one needs to be driven from the point A to point B he s/he doesn’t need driver’s consciousness, but only intellect. That example could be expanded to multiple tasks and jobs, where people’s consciousness will no longer be necessary because AI could do the tasks they used to do unconsciously (in the new meaning of this word) and much cheaper.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the masses of people were exploited, (at least, according to Karl Marx). But exploitation still implies a dependency, masses of people were involved in the production and therefore necessary. That’s how all class struggle came about and blah, blah, blah… Because there was a demand on a people’s labor, people were able to control the capital, to some extent, to make the demands through the legislature, public organizations, etc.

Nowadays, millions of people from exploited could become unnecessary. And that is a great reason to feel uncertain.