We live in a society where access to the essentials of life is predicated on having a job. I’m talking shelter, food, medication, children’s clothing, etc. Other means to access these are exceptions funded by the proceeds of jobs.
So for the Canadian government to aggressively push to replace jobs with AI without equally aggressive efforts to rework this basic arrangement is a recipe for misery.
Previous generations of automation already replaced well-paying jobs with bad ones. Gone were the pensions, the predictable hours, the weekends, the job security, the ability to feed and shelter a family on a typical wage.
This new class of automation, dubbed AI, will introduce another change: an environment where there’s far more people than jobs. The money will still all be in the system of course, but it will have been transferred from the pockets of workers to corporate ledgers.
We need to buck that trend. Not through the reintroduction of menial labour, but through government structures to return proceeds to the people so that we may still thrive. A tax, if you will.
But if the repealed Digital Sales Tax is any indicator, this is not the government for audacious ideas.
The genie is out of the bottle with AI; it will only continue to eat jobs. If MPs can only continue to harp on it as if they were board members at the expense of their constituents, then we are destined for a series successive crises – starting with young people not being able to find work.
