Can the free market ensure artificial intelligence won't wipe out human workers?

What will you be doing only a decade from now when advanced versions of the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT have wormed their way into the fabric of life?

According to some experts, you may be out of a job. Two current labour disputes involving autoworkers and screenwriters are at least partly about the future threat of AI.

When AI comes for the jobs, writers may be among the first to go, warn two respected technology mavens writing in Foreign Affairs magazine. And they are not alone in that view. Even current versions of the AI program ChatGPT can sketch clearer prose than most humans, they say. And those programs are getting better.

By 2035, as "white-collar workers lose their jobs en masse," declare Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman, AI will be running hospitals and airlines and courtrooms. "A year ago, that scenario would have seemed purely fictional; today, it seems nearly inevitable."

For Bremmer and Suleyman, job losses are a relatively mundane result of the AI revolution. Their ultimate concern is nothing less than the usurping of government power by intelligent machines and those who control them.

But will massive numbers of writers and lawyers and stockbrokers and coders and office workers really be sent home to twiddle their thumbs in a little over 10 years? There are many thoughtful skeptics who say there are really good reasons why that just won't happen. And at the core of it all, they say, is our unique humanity.

Peeking 10 years into the future leaks into the realm of science fiction, and those who imagine the future — while sometimes offering useful warnings — can easily get things wrong. Viewing the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good reminder.

"Anyone who says they can tell you that they can predict what's going to happen is either deluded or lying," said Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder, who has written about AI in his novel Stealing Worlds and the short story The Suicide of our Troubles.

There is a certain irony in the comment, since Schroeder is also a professional futurist helping companies prepare for what may be around the corner.

He is convinced there is a value in using imagination to frame the possible extent of the AI problem as it becomes better at human tasks.

"It isn't any different from the question of what to do with the jackhammer when you're the guy with the pickaxe," Schroeder said. 

The lack of certainty over how AI will develop — and how quickly — means its eventual impact is open to infinite speculation, he said. As governments around the world consider how to regulate it, the unknowable nature of what AI will become is just one of many complications.

But unless intelligent machines grow into evil geniuses that decide to crush us like bugs, said Schroeder and everyone else I talked to, there is one certainty in the future relationship between humans and machines, and that is humanity.

"Much of what we do as humans, even though we have our official job titles, goes outside of the official job descriptions," said AJung Moon, who teaches computer engineering at McGill University in Montreal.