Even a cursory glance at the plethora of articles on online news media platforms will show just how much attention artificial intelligence (AI) technology and its impact on society has been receiving of late.
Enthusiasts are predictably sanguine about the advance of AI and the way in which it will change the world for the better. Others, including many governments, are more cautious, mindful of how this powerful technology can become a very dangerous tool in the wrong hands.
Among the many issues surrounding the rapid advances of AI, one that touches large swaths of society is surely how it will change the nature of human work.
Indeed, in most developed and in some developing countries, AI is on the verge of penetrating every major industry including healthcare, logistics, finance, advertising, and legal practice. Furthermore, it is also true to say that AI is reshaping these industries in surprising and unanticipated ways.
The rapid pace at which all this is happening even as AI continues to evolve can be unnerving.
Some observers wonder what all this would mean for the future of human work. Some even speculate if human work as we know it has a future! They worry that technology will one day replace human labour en masse resulting in the dawn of a jobless future—with disastrous ramifications for both individuals and society.
Several studies have been done in the past decade to “predict” the impact of AI on the workforce and on human work.
For example, in 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne from the University of Oxford conducted a famous study which grimly predicted that 47 per cent of total employment in the United States was at high risk of disappearing over the next couple of decades.1 The cyber-futurist Ray Kurzweil prophesied that by 2029 there will be almost no human employment in industrial production, agriculture, and the transportation industry.2
However, in a massive study conducted in 2018 by MIT’s Work of the Future Task Force, a different picture emerged.
This institution-wide initiative is purposed “to understand how emerging technologies are changing the nature of human work and the skills required— and how we can design and leverage technological innovations for the benefit of everyone in society”.3
Its report, which was published in 2020, concluded that the world will not see a situation where there is not enough work for people to do due to the increasing use of sophisticated automation.
Although the findings of these studies on the scale of disruptions and job losses that we will witness because of AI are inconclusive, the fact remains many will lose their jobs and remain jobless if they are not afforded opportunities to upgrade their skills.
Only time will reveal the true impact that AI will have on human work as new technologies take time to diffuse, to be implemented and to reach their transformative potential.
Job losses and its impact on livelihoods, however, is not the only concern pertaining to the invasion of AI in the workplace.
Some commentators have warned that while the pervasive use of intelligent technology can improve efficiency and increase productivity, it exacts certain costs that we would be wise to avoid. I am referring to more fundamental human loss in aspects such as motivation, skill and creativity.
In 2023, the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journal published an interesting article which examines the impact of AI on decision-making, laziness and privacy concerns.
According to the article, “[t]he findings show that 68.9 per cent of laziness in humans, 68.6 per cent in personal privacy and security issues, and 27.7 per cent in the loss of decision-making [sic] are due to the impact of artificial intelligence in Pakistani and Chinese society”.4
In the arena of healthcare, while AI-powered systems such as diagnostic algorithms can assist in the diagnosis of medical conditions, there is a growing concern that over-reliance on such technologies can erode and diminish the diagnostic skills of physicians.
In the realm of the creative arts, there is a concern that generative AI, which can produce remarkable pieces of art, music or literature, can also induce what some have described as “creativity complacency”: the erosion of the motivation to imagine and create.
The disruptions that AI introduces have serious implications on what the Judeo-Christian tradition regards as fundamental principles associated with human work and the human worker. These principles include work as a divine vocation, the worker as the created co-creator because he bears the divine image, and the fact that it is humans, not machines, who are mandated by God to exercise dominion.
The disruptions that AI introduces have serious implications on what the Judeo-Christian tradition regards as fundamental principles associated with human work and the human worker. These principles include work as a divine vocation, the worker as the created co-creator because he bears the divine image, and the fact that it is humans, not machines, who are mandated by God to exercise dominion.
However, this does not mean that the Christian faith demands that we should all be Luddites, shunning all technological advances including AI. But it does mean that we must exercise profound prudence and control.
As the co-authors of the insightful book The Age of AI put it:
Ultimately, individuals and societies will have to make up their minds which aspects of life to reserve for human intelligence and which to turn over to AI or human-AI collaboration … Our task will be to understand the transformations that AI brings to human experience, the challenges it presents to human identity, and which aspects of these developments require regulations or counterbalancing by other human commitments. Charting a human future turns on defining a human role in AI.5
1 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114 (17 September 2013), https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf.
2 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York, Penguin Books, 2000), 17-39.
3 “MIT Work of the Future”, IPC MIT Industrial Performance Center, accessed May 9, 2024, https://workofthefuture-taskforce.mit.edu/.
4 Sayed Fayaz Ahmed, et al., “Impact of artificial intelligence on human loss in decision-making, laziness and safety in education”, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10, 311 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01787-8.
5 Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI (Great Britain: John Murray Publishers, 2022), 183.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor of Christian Doctrine at Trinity Theological College and Theological and Research Advisor at the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.