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It was inevitable

AI is coming for our jobs, or so we're told.

Just as the industrial revolution effectively destroyed swathes of jobs involving unskilled manual labour, so AI will wipe out a whole bunch of positions that will henceforth be relegated to a footnote in the history books.

AI proponents counter these dire predictions by pointing out that "as one door closes, another opens" and AI itself will produce new jobs (presumably such as dusting racks of GPUs in datacentres) so everyone's a winner.

Well last week there was some disturbing but not surprising news.

Getty Images, one of the world's largest commercial photography libraries, has filed for bankruptcy.

Reuters reports that the failure is due to growing competition from AI-generated images and that even a proposed merger with competitor Shutterstock couldn't save it.

With any imaginable image now available from a simple text prompt, stock image libraries have effectively been devalued by an enormous amount and this is just the start of the "adjustment" that AI will deliver.

Other similar industries such as graphic artists are being similarly impacted by the ability for those with zero artistic ability to conjure up professional-looking images from their keyboards using the power of generative AI.

I've written before about the dire future for musicians who must now not only compete with each other for market-share but also with AI-generated tracks that have flooded streaming services such as Spotify, effectively diluting the payout to "real" musicians and singers.

However, the effects of AI will go far beyond the creative areas. I'm now seeing countless advertisements for AI "experts" that will advise you on investments, tax, law and a raft of other things that were previously the domain of well-paid professionals.

To understand why this is happening we need only consider the names we used to give to artificial intelligence, which were "machine learning" and "expert systems".

Yes, by training an AI system on the sum total of knowledge in a specific discipline, it becomes an expert with a depth and breadth of knowledge that far exceeds any individual human being. Naturally this means such an AI system has the "potential" to outperform a human in the role of expert consultant and often they do.

Oh the irony that now it is the most expert and most highly trained workers who face the greatest risks from AI, quite the turn-around from a century ago when a chainsaw enabled one man to replace three others who only had axes or a motorized digger could do the work of six men with shovels.

Indeed, until we have better, cheaper humanoid robots, it is now the manual workers and tradies whose jobs are safest. No matter how smart ChatGPT or Gemini become, you'll still need a real human to come and unclog your toilet when it backs up or to fix the faulty wiring in your house.

However, even these workers ought not get too smug because, if AI produces higher levels of unemployment (as it well-could) then there might not be many who can afford their services even if they need them.

Ah... happy days ahead.

What we're seeing right now is an incredible redistribution of wealth. When you see a single company (SpaceX) attracting almost US$90 billion by way of its IPO, you must realise that this money has to come from somewhere. It is a redistribution of capital.

Then there is the US$1.8 trillion that will have been thrown at the AI industry itself by year's-end. Once again, that isn't "new" money, it represents funds that have been taken from somewhere else and been redistributed to the AI industry.

When the AI bubble bursts, that almost two trillion dollars will effectively be all but lost.

Think about that for a moment... in the "worst case" situation, a collapse of the AI bubble where most of the value was lost would see up to US$2,500 for every man, woman and child on the face of the earth, wiped out.

That is the scale of the crisis that awaits us.

As I said... happy days ahead, or maybe not.

Plant your vegetable garden, put some cash under the mattress and enjoy the summer folks.

Carpe Diem folks!

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