In Fred Voccola’s THE COMING DISRUPTION: How AI First Will Force Organizations to Change Everything or Face Destruction, the stakes are clearly described. Our species is at a crossroads: AI will either usher in something like a new age for humankind, or create a nightmarish dystopia that inflicts untold suffering onto billions. Despite the book’s omissions, it makes for compelling reading.
As a successful entrepreneur and businessman, Voccola does not claim AI’s essentialness so much as assert it, stating that companies who make it central to their functioning will thrive while others will fail. This section of the book is the most problematic—not because of this statement, but because of its all-things-to-all-men approach to the technology, which, for millions of workers whose jobs are at risk, is difficult to sustain. Nor does Voccola have anything to say about AI poisoning, knowledge collapse, the increasing ubiquity of slop, AI’s enormous environmental impact, or any other of its discontents.
This section, however, is arguably not where the true worth of THE COMING DISRUPTION lies. It is prescient in its forecast of how AI will shortly transform the world. Voccola foresees a fundamental shift in societal organization, as companies adopt AI en masse and millions find themselves unemployed. Voccola contends that a period of upheaval will be followed by a period of “restructuring” which, among other eye-opening shifts, will see blue-collar jobs (because they are less likely to be immediately affected by AI) being valued over those in middle management and the like—overturning the age-old emphasis on traditional forms of higher education. The final phase, as Voccola puts it, will be “heaven or hell”—depending on the efficacy with which solutions to mass unemployment in particular are put in place.
The certainty with which Voccola lays out his forecast and timeline may be challenged, but it’s hard to see how his ideas will not come to pass somehow, and soon. Voccola intuits (what is almost certainly correct) that hopes of a moratorium or “slow adaptation” of AI’s development is doomed to failure in a hyper-competitive world, but still remains optimistic. Despite the hedging language liberally sprinkled throughout, his solutions to managing disruption are the right ones: governments should tax wisely, institute massive retraining programs, and “stabilize unrest without choking innovation.”
The problem is that Voccola never defines what any of this would look like. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect him to. But, equally, the “devastating bust” Voccola foresees for large sectors of the workforce unable to adapt in the face of a permanently shrunken job market surely needs more emphasis here. He states that a key solution—universal basic income—will become a “global political football.” The wider point to be grasped is that, despite its weaknesses, this solution is the only game in town.
Fred Voccola’s THE COMING DISRUPTION: How AI First Will Force Organizations to Change Everything or Face Destruction is a bold, frank look at how artificial intelligence will revolutionize every aspect of our lives.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader