Originally published on The Messenger by James Cooper, Fernando Garibay and Kashyap Kompella
For decades, the United States and other northern industrialized countries have moved their economies from manufacturing to services. They offshored the smokestacks of yesteryear to the developing world and with them, the black lung disease, industrial accidents and labor strife. Clean rooms and hackathons became the workshops as the developed world moved to a knowledge-based, post-industrial economy. This globalization bargain worked through the 1990s and 2000s. But such a post-Fordist model benefits the developed world only if its innovators do the designing, inventing, licensing and royalty collection that come with leadership in disruptive technologies.
Indeed, the post-Cold War global trading regime, typified by the World Trade Organization and regional and bilateral agreements the U.S. signed with trading partners, was based on the understanding that the developing world would host low-skilled factories and the developed world would produce knowledge and commercialize it. The knowledge-based economy has created a world in which intellectual property became king and the industrialized north created new “things” — the internet, GPS, 5G, the mobile telephone, semiconductor-chip designs, social media, pharmaceutical breakthroughs and other game-changing technologies. Knowledge was incentivized, celebrated, leveraged and rewarded. Sometimes it went into the public domain, becoming part of the collective commons; other times it went public (as in, an initial public offering).
But with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), our knowledge increasingly risks being commodified and supplanted by machine learning. Whether it is law, medicine, accounting, finance, scriptwriting, music or a host of other services, AI is making rapid and unsettling changes. If the current pace of progress in AI continues, there will be a question mark over the role of human workers in the new economic paradigms centered around algorithms and automation. Why should companies pay for health care, pensions and other social safety net niceties when algorithms can make decisions and machines can work around the clock and not complain, unionize, take vacations or waste time gossiping at the proverbial water cooler? Such a disruption instigates the need for a “cultural worker” — a digital artisan who redefines and elevates our human value.
In the future, we may witness the current archetype of knowledge worker diminishing in importance, ceding the space for this new kind of creative and economic agent. We need to return to something akin to the Renaissance, a period during which the arts changed society. Humanity proved its worth by expressing knowledge and then intelligence, eventually ending in wisdom and enlightenment. Works of art and other artifacts of beauty were created in this process. The era of synthetic intelligence now knocking on our doors requires us to reimagine and retool the human part of the production cycle. We need to turn the ingenuity, creativity and tacit knowledge acquired through the march of human civilization into actionable and valuable outputs.
Humans must embody the value proposition that cannot be replicated by machines. We have experienced the shaky end of the post-Industrial Revolution with its polarized reaction to globalization, as seen through recent regressions to isolationism, xenophobia, populism and scapegoating. We have also witnessed society’s yearning for a return to more traditional, holistic wellness, accompanied by health and spirituality. We must synthesize the best of past eras and look forward to a time of new harmony, when machines will do more of our grunt work but not the soul-searching, emotional fulfillment for us. Many people suggest regulating AI but we also need to rethink the human-machine partnership.
AI is not replacing us; it complements what humans do. To collaborate with synthetic intelligence, we must develop an early line of defense. If government, industry and academia plan and prepare, we could avoid short-term employment shocks and displacement.
Creativity provides us the cognitive faculties to distill a more meaningful and purposeful life. As long as our souls and consciousness cannot be quantified or qualified, humans will always play a role. This new renaissance sees machines as helpers, not hinderers. We can coexist. This is not a zero-sum game but a game of zeros and ones. We are the ones.
James Cooper is professor of law at California Western School of Law in San Diego and was a U.S. delegate to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Advisory Committee on Enforcement.
Fernando Garibay is a former executive, producer and artist at Interscope and founder of the Garibay Center, a global creativity research institute.
Kashyap Kompella is CEO of RPA2AI Research and a visiting professor for artificial intelligence at BITS School of Management (BITSoM).
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