A recent study by the Irish Minister for Finance estimates that AI will likely replace a full third of jobs in the tiny island nation — the rest presumably to be re-assigned to migrants imported from the Third World until AI can get those too.
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Via RTE (emphasis added):
Minister for Finance Michael McGrath has said a study by his department has concluded that up to one-third of jobs in Ireland could be at risk in the future from artificial intelligence.
He was speaking at the inaugural Global Economic Summit, taking place in Killarney, Co Kerry.
Mr McGrath said the Department of Finance and the Department of Enterprise are currently finalising joint papers on the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy and on the labour market.
He said those studies estimate that AI will affect around two thirds of employment in Ireland.
In some cases, the effect will be positive, but in other cases, jobs will be at risk.
The minister goes on to cite AI’s rapidly expanding cognitive capacities — the implication being that the scope of jobs on the chopping block extends well beyond repetitive manual labor tasks like assembly line work into virtually all domains of human labor. There is apparently no limiting principle as to what work AI could do better and more efficiently than humans, outside of, arguably, those that require a “human touch” like counseling or childcare. But even those are in play.
The sky is the limit:
"It is the case that up to one third of employment could be at risk from the deployment of AI, but it doesn't mean that those jobs will be lost," Minister McGrath said.
"They may well change and there will also be other jobs created by the enormous positive potential of AI.
"Some roles will change, some roles will disappear in the future because we are now going beyond technological automation. We are into the space of cognitive ability being presented by AI and that will change the way that we work into the future.”
One-third of human jobs going the way of the buffalo, while perhaps accurate in the short to medium-range future, is likely a dramatic undercount in the long-term. A close estimate would probably be something like 95-99%, with a handful of servant roles (sex slave, organ-donor-in-waiting, etc.) available to service the ruling technocratic elite, which may either still be human themselves or AI or some dystopian combination thereof a la the Borg of Star Trek.
But even if we take the one-third figure at face value, and remove all the other variables unleashed by technological advance from the equation, the social and economic and political ramifications are beyond imagination.
What happens when one-third of the entire human labor force becomes obsolete — when they no longer have any use for the self-appointed architects of the post-industrial Fourth Reich?
The only apropos conclusion to stories such as these comes from Terence McKenna:
It’s only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So, I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder, and weirder, and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point novelty theory can come out of the woods, ah, because eventually people are going to say, “What the hell is going on?”… The systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.
