Will AI make bricklayers better-paid than barristers?

Old tortoise that I am, my head usually yanks back into my shell when people start talking about artificial intelligence. One reason for this is laziness in the face of the challenge of learning to understand a deep and complex subject. I’m not proud of that.

But of another reason I’m unashamed. Societies standing at the brink of a massive leap forward in technology have never been much good at predicting where the innovation will lead. The printing press, telegraphy, typewriting and motor car; the wireless and television; the telephone, the tank, the mobile phone… who would have guessed usefully at the landscape into which these inventions would usher us? The dawn of each technology will have been (indeed, was) heralded by intense and lively debate about where it would lead: debate we’d read now with a wry smile at how little we knew. So why waste our time, this time?

Nor is it that we always underestimate; we can overestimate too. I remember my father telling me that stereoscopic photography would take the world by storm. A few people did buy twin-lens cameras and viewers, but interest fizzled out. 3D movies have yet to become the norm, though both Dad and I long ago predicted they would.

He told me stereo music recording would lose its novelty value because the aim of any conductor was to achieve a unified sound; while electricity would soon be so cheap and plentiful that nobody would even bother to switch lights off any more. And Dad was a power engineer. But he couldn’t know. Nobody could.

The big new advance being AI, everyone is trying to predict. But it’s a mug’s game, though I must admit to astonishment at how useful ChatGPT is already proving in my work.