Personally valuable, less socially necessary: the future of skills?

There was always something comforting about being bad at something. Being bad was temporary. It meant that there was something left to learn.

Both the quote above and the topic of this post are from a certain individual I don't know by name, but wrote a piece recently on AI and I wished to explore this topic further.

I once came across a post that said "Bad art is still better than AI art" and when I was reading through the linked essay above and came to the part I quoted, I remembered this.

I think I understand it better now why some people feel so strongly negative about AI. It has nothing nothing to do with hating billionaires, capitalism, Big Tech, the government, none of that.

This strong negative feeling is mostly a result of an internal battle people are fighting as they come to realize that they've been priced out.

That's all that is happening these days. We are all being priced out.

AI has learned to be better at the skills we spent years learning to perfection.

What should take months can now be done in a matter of hours.

As the quoted writer observed, these changes are not narrow.

We are not dealing with automation that focuses on one thing, we are dealing with multi-modal intelligence.

This means that everyone gets to feel the heat in some form, at some point, and once that happens, it's next to impossible to catch up.

The future of skills

Our whole existence has been about facilitating one trade or the other. This is something I've discussed within a completely different context.

That said, skills are just one of the many things we acquired to trade away.

If you lack the yam to trade for tomato, or regular bank notes, then you must find other things that would be useful, no?

The skills we pick up over the years allow us to trade our time and solve real problems through service.

This is how most people contribute to society and how they are able to receive back from said society.

So what happens when the masses are priced out of that "usefulness" because there's a cheaper and faster means that doesn't sacrifice quality?

In fact, in some case, better quality is received

This is the problem and my guess of what happens is nothing more than a guess, like anyone else's.

So it isn't worth always focusing on trying to figure out what comes next because if we are being honest with ourselves, nobody really knows and the only way to find out is to allow ourselves to go through it.

Or better, go through with it?

We'll only figure out what's next by getting to that point which will be considered the "next phase."

Maybe other skills that can be traded will emerge or maybe our value systems will change and our world won't be about trading things back and forth, simply to exist, anymore.

Posted Using INLEO