Will AI free us from drudgery – or leave us jobless and hungry?

theguardian.com:

G oodbye humans, hello “Tessa”. The US-based National Eating Disorders Association (Neda) is making headlines after firing all its staff and replacing them with an AI-assisted chatbot called Tessa. This happened just four days after the six paid employees, who oversaw about 200 volunteers, successfully unionised. Coincidence? Oh, absolutely, Neda said; it was a long-anticipated change that had nothing to do with unionisation. A blogpost written by a helpline associate begs to differ and calls the move “union busting, plain and simple”.

Is this a harbinger of things to come? Are we about to see millions of jobs wiped out as humans are replaced by AI assistants with female names? After stealing all of our jobs, are the Tessas of the world going to unionise and stage a digital takeover of Earth?

The short answer is: maybe. All emerging technology goes through the “Gartner hype cycle”; now, we’re at the inflated expectations and breathless predictions stage of that cycle, and heading towards the “trough of disillusionment”, before things supposedly level out. I don’t think AI will lead to the end of civilisation as we know it in the near future. But I do think an awful lot of corporations are champing at the bit to replace as many expensive humans as they can with AI and will use the new technology as a way to clamp down on a recent wave of labour organising. In the next few years I think we are going to see a lot of chaotic experimentation as companies rush to cost-cut and bring their own “Tessas” to market.

Not everyone is admitting this, of course. It tends to be bad for employee morale when your boss is crowing about how many extra yachts they can buy when they replace you with an algorithm. IBM is one of the few companies