MIT economist David Autor is warning that AI could create a "Mad Max" scenario, in which the job market becomes dominated by cheap and commoditized labor.
Autor made his grim prediction during an interview on the "Possible" podcast, hosted by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and his chief of staff Aria Finger.
When asked whether he thought society is headed towards a "Wall-E" scenario — where "people sit around on hovercraft armchairs watching holographic TV" — or much grimmer alternative, Autor had an alarming answer.
"The more likely scenario to me looks much more like 'Mad Max: Fury Road,' where everybody is competing over a few remaining resources that aren't controlled by some warlord somewhere," he said.
"So you can have a world that's very wealthy and yet, most people don't have anything," he added somberly.
The 2015 blockbuster Autor references takes place in a desolate Australian landscape where various rival gangs fight for access to dwindling water supplies and fuel. A wealthy class of tyrannical rulers controls access to these resources, exploiting the collapse of civilization.
Autor seems to suggest that AI could similarly lead to a race to the bottom by devaluing jobs to the point where once-valuable skills are rendered practically worthless, while also concentrating wealth even further.
"The threat that rapid automation poses — to the degree it poses as a threat — is not running out of work, but making the valuable skills that people have highly abundant so they're no longer valuable," Autor said.
"Automation can either increase the expertise of your work by eliminating the supporting tasks and allowing you to focus on what you're really good at," Autor argued. "Or, it can descale your work by automating the expert parts and just leaving you with a sort of last mile."
Instead, the economist suggested that "we should be thinking about where will expertise be needed, where will it be displaced, and how do we enable people to do expert work with better tools?"
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