Why AI Is Not An Existential Threat

1. An economy is not about how many people are employed. It is about how much those people can produce. AI is a productivity booster. Entrepreneurs (when allowed to) will find ways to leverage any and all resources to create marginal value, marginal advantage. If someone could foresee what an entire labor force or section of a labor force would be doing in 5-10 years, they’d probably be working on a way to make money off it and not prognosticating about it. People engaged with AI on a business level are already using it to create marginal value and thinking of ways to leverage it further.
2. For most of human history, people were valued based on things like how much they could carry or build or serve. When commerce became more free, accessible, people were able to be valued by how much value they could produce, on the margin. With machines, from simple to more sophisticated, knowledge work became a reality. A thousand years ago how many rock movers imagined buildings full of software developers whose output is tooling to optimize advertising for electric toothbrushes? AI is a tool that unlocks new possibilities for what and how we can produce.
3. Our minds are more than efficient prediction machines. AI models responses and automates task based on prediction algorithms. So do many parts of our brain. But our brain does much more. It interprets and selects from a huge amount of sensory input every moment. It assigns significance or otherwise to the input, determining what to pay attention to and how. This is based on emotions, a deep swath of experience and memory which create patterns. It is also based on reasoning, when it gets to that part of the brain, after it is filtered through the signification heuristics of emotion, experience and pattern. These pre-reasoning elements, and even extreme reasoning elements, allow us to explore and experience the unknown, the unlanguaged, the inexperienced (even if it is only that it’s the first time we, as an individual, have experienced something). We can have mystical experiences, not in an exclusively religious sense. But in the sense of something that is different from reason or explainability. Our brains are part of us, embodied. We have senses. This entire organism of us, body and brain, is the foundation of our continued ability to adapt, discover, create new. This is turbocharged by communities or societies organized around and which value, adaptation, discovery, innovation. 

The doomsday scenario is not AI. The doomsday scenario is stifling human creativity.