What is the end game of this AI race ?

This is more of an open question, than a rant, though it might read more like the latter.

30 November 2022. According to Google, that is when Open- AI launched their flagship AI model : Chat-Gpt. We all know what happened next, the initial versions were full of bugs, and problematic, but eventually it improved. In the coming months, other competing tech companies release their own versions of AI models and applications. 

So, By the end of 2025, humanity would have lived and coexisted with generative AI for three years. And the landscape has been permanently changed. 

But how ? Well, lets see, there is still a lot of AI slop, incorrrect data and biases in the answers generate by AI, but things have slowly improved maybe ? But the real impact can be seen in the real world now, and some of the people most impacted are the folks who helped build AI in the first place.

Unemployment has grown. The first impacted were artists of all kind: painters, musicians, singers.. and even actors. The abundance of art available online was used to (sometimes illegally) to train AI models, which can now efficiently recreate original works, but heavily influenced by human artists. Work which was traditionally given to artists, everything from posters on the street, ads online to vfx and entire movies, are now delivered by AI. This resulted in a big strike in hollywood in 2023. After 5 months, an agreement was reached in hollywood on how to use AI, without replacing the human artist. 

The next impacted seem to be everyone else: more and more office/desk work can now be automated via AI bots/agents, which can easily be trained to take over from a human. And the folks in technology seem to be hit pretty hard. The problem can be seen amplified in countries that do not have labour laws protecting the employees in place. Earlier this year, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) axed 12,000 employees in its largest-ever layoff round. Rival Infosys is touting AI bots it says can slash manpower needs by up to 35 per cent. 

As of now, it is the youngest employees joining the workforce that are most impacted; and how ! They were keen on gaming the system by using AI, but seem to be losing at the final level. At first, students were excited about using AI to complete their course homework. Then the professors caught on: they started using AI to assign tasks , create new challenges, and even grade students work. But in the endgame, new graduates from universities are unable to land their first jobs. The reason: companies are now using AI to automate those entry level jobs, which were done by fresh graduates upto a few years ago.

This pattern , and problem, is now being reported from about every country in the world, and there does not seem to be an fix anytime soon. The reason probably is that companies do not see it as a problem in the first place, they are happy with the lower costs of running things, without the added 'baggage' of human resources. But eventually , the problem is going to overflow from fresh graduates, to even experienced working professionals.

So that got me thinking: what is the end game of this flow ? The way the world economy is setup, human beings are an necessary part of the whole flow. 

It is the humans that consume goods and services, everything from groceries to 3k smart phones and millon dollar homes. 

It is the humans that travel and spend on things they do and do not need. 

It the humans that pay taxes, and vote in elections, and pay for utilities and services.

If every human being can be replaced by AI, who is going to buy all the goods ? You know, the same products that these AI embracing companies are producing. Banks need people to take out loans, that is what generates its revenue. Hospitality companies need poeple to travel, for work or pleasure, or their whole business will collapse, as was seen during the great COVID lockdowns. And every other private company is trying to sell something to a human a the end of their supply chain.

So eventually there are going to be things to be sold, but no one who can buy. Which is the technical definition of a recession. 

Which is likely where governments are going to wake up to reality. The private companies are definitely going to self-regulate, it is in their best interest to profit off replacing humans. The most likely stop to this mess will likely come from federal governments stepping in to slow, and eventually stop the carnage.  Some political party will have to take a hard stand, and work for the human again. You know ,the folks who actually vote and pay taxes. 

I just hope it does not take that long.