“AI will take everyone’s jobs.” “Claude just outdated UX designers.” “ChatGPT just ended analysts’ future.”
All of these phrases have become borderline-cliché within such a short period of time. So… what does this Clichéification actually mean? Is it that we really fear our jobs will get taken? Are we afraid to realize we’re disposable? Or is it something deeper?
For the past 30 years our definition of being useful, and let alone successful, has been tightly related to software proficiency: how efficient you are with Excel, how well your PowerPoint decks communicate meeting reports, or even how fluently you write JavaScript or Python. Critical thinking and strategic decision-making became something almost C-suite exclusive.
So, somewhere along the way, software proficiency became standard. And as time has passed, this standard turned the vast majority into corporate drones, widening the gap to actual decision makers. Software became less of a tool to stand out, and ended up keeping everyone’s time full of repetitive tasks with very little mind space to develop actual critical thinking.
So… could it be possible that what we actually fear is to realize we became judgment-less? That now, a future with tools that fill in for those repetitive tasks means we have to actually think? To… decide?
This scenario goes way beyond the corporate world. It involves new political grounds, a revolution in educational practices, and even a restructure of socioeconomic structures, since the ability to analyze environment variables, filter slop, and decide has taken on a priority like never before.
This priority sets the basis for an economy where decision makers thrive as they never have before. Human productivity is gradually becoming more criteria-focused. It may sound counter-intuitive to think democratized AI tools are provoking this (taking into account the Clichéification stated before) but, as we learn to harness those same AI tools, the repetitive “corporate drone” tasks that have tied us down to our desks will get solved — paving the way to a mainstream critical-thinking economy.
The AI-driven economy of 2036 is bound for an inward, deeper society.
Let’s set an example: up to last year (pre-democratized, mainstream GenAI tools) a clerk was tied to his desk applying VLOOKUPs and generating reports for senior managers who would most likely only skim over them, or not read them at all. And that’s what his life’s time was spent on. Now, this same clerk can handle these tasks within a few minutes — which, hopefully, will make him question other aspects of his job and, ten years from now, he will have reached the point of dedicating his criteria and judgment to interpret inputs in a more thorough way, resulting in deeper outputs with a lot more to unpack than nowadays, resulting in richer value for him, for his company, the stakeholders, and, inevitably, the economy. This future will not be about how many people we have “punching in,” but how much quality people bring to the table through these richer outputs.
The AI-driven economy of 2036 is bound for an inward, deeper society. Critical thinking — product of this productivity boost and newly available time — will shape a society that holds AI at its mercy, which will eventually push us into a “further” society.
One of the best-case scenarios that we at Hypateon believe this “further” society will become is one of a re-renaissance. As an economy that puts this newly available time back into neglected primary sectors like agriculture, social and cultural movements will bloom from within a smarter and deeper place than today; values will reflect a “back to basics” approach in order to develop a more cohesive economy. A society that empowers the human as the center of the universe once again, reflects on the moral losses of technology-saturation from the past decades, and corrects course — making sure fewer people are needed for “corporate” important decisions, resulting in a more efficient enterprise world.
Democratized AI is the first step of leaving behind a tech-dependent society and growing into a tech-symbiosis one. Our future is headed toward a “further,” more “human” economy.