We Were Worried About the Wrong Aspect of AI

Everyone has the same nightmare now, and it is a very boring one. You are at your desk. An email arrives. It is warm and grammatically perfect, which is how you know a machine wrote it, and it explains that your role has been "transitioned" and that the company thanks you for your "contributions to the journey". You have been made redundant by something that does not get tired, does not unionize, and does not need dental. This is the fear that sells magazine covers and fills conference keynotes. It is the fear that launched a thousand reskilling startups. And it is, I want to suggest, the wrong fear - or at least the smaller threat. We are all staring so hard at the threat to our paychecks that we have failed to notice the threat to something we never thought to put a price on. While we were busy worrying about AI taking our jobs, we forgot to ask whether it might take our freedom. The Kurzweil TrickRay Kurzweil, who has built a career on being right about the future slightly more…