While on Reddit today, I was reading a posting in the r/smallbusiness community. Someone posted that they were having difficulty launching their business doing bookkeeping for other small businesses. They were bemoaning the difficulty of getting people to trust them. Someone else posited that soon a bookkeeper’s job would be gone to AI. Those words might well be prophetic. They struck a chord in me today because I used ChatGPT to create a chart of accounts for the business I just started. Next thing I know, my accounting system based on “Generally accepted accounting principles” has been set up.
I did not even need an accountant or bookkeeper to get started. ChatGPT distilled everything down for me and it worked. While I should feel good for accomplishing something of a personal milestone, I feel quite the opposite. I feel worried because it dawned on me that one of the services I thought I might be able to sell would be remote bookkeeping. Well, clearly I might be very wrong. This lead to some deep thoughts.
What does our society do when AI replaces many professions? What do we do to earn a living to pay for our needs, wants, and desires in an economic system that depends on consumption? When nobody has money to spend to make the gears of the economic machine turn, everything grinds to a complete and devastating halt. Soon the only jobs left will be working in fast food. Even those jobs disappear as robots cook the burgers, chicken, and fries.
When the middle class occupations cease to exist, we go back to feudalism, a 180 degree turn in human history for the worse. I wonder if AI will usher in a dark ages for this millennia. My present job, being a security guard, is being replaced by technology. This has now dawned on me. The very fabric and underpinnings of our beliefs and culture are about to be torn to shreds.