My first chopping board was something cheap I got from Ikea. The most recent one I bought was made by a local carpenter I met at a craft fair. He gave me a card with his contact details, so that I could pop down to his workshop if I had any problems with warping, or needed it re-sanded at some point. The point of this story — other than to out myself as the dreadful hipster that I now realise I am — is that it sums up one view of how AI and automation might change the world of work.
This vision was articulated last month by the economist Alex Imas, who has just been appointed “Director of AGI Economics” at Google DeepMind. In an essay titled “What will be scarce?” he argued that even in a scenario in which advanced AI and automation could one day produce most goods and services more cheaply than humans, the demand for human labour would not necessarily disappear.
Instead, he said, as people got richer, they would want to spend more of their money on “the human-intensive, provenance-rich, sometimes artisanal part of the economy where the human aspect is part of the value of the good or service itself”. In other words, AI might make dreadful hipsters of us all.