CHICAGO–It’s a cycle and assumption as old as credit unions themselves: a person joins a credit union perhaps in their youth, then the CU is with them every step of the way as they get an education and enter a career field, make more money and borrow from the CU. It’s all about serving the working class—but what about the “unworking class?"
In a provocative essay, historian Yuval Noah Harari makes a bracing prediction: just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class.
According to Harari, the most most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: “What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?”
In an article on Ideas.Ted.com, Harari imagines a scenario that has huge implications for credit unions as he predicts a future that includes what he calls the “useless class.”
Thinking that’s a long way off? Harari notes that “ ‘forever’ often means no more than a decade or two. Until a short time ago, facial recognition was a favorite example of something that babies accomplish easily but which escaped even the most powerful computers. Today, facial-recognition programs are able to identify people far more efficiently and quickly than humans can.”
For a look at the provocative questions raised by Harari, go here.