Are Humans Still Needed?

I have been thinking about AI and how for a lot of people, in a very brief span of time, it has become like a very helpful assistant. For most, AI is the LLM model they use, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or Gemini. What many are not seeing is the more ambitious race which is taking place and which is far more consequential – artificial general intelligence or AGI.

To simplify what AGI is imagine a system whose reasoning power vastly exceeds that of any human who has ever existed. To compare it with the current power of AI, the current systems would be the interns that come to gain some experience at the office while AGI would be like a team of Nobel laureates who do not need to stop, sleep or be fed. This would be the moment where machines do not simply assist us but begin to outperform us across almost all domains which today are considered exclusively human. This is not an if this will happen scenario but a when will it happen one, and the timelines vary wildly, 5, 10, 20 years. Yet the manner the technology is developing make these just a guess which can change very quickly. This raises the question what type of world will we have when AGI arrives.

The main question which keeps coming to me is how society in general change and more specifically what profound shifts will happen in the nature of work. We know that AI-empowered robots will be able to perform tasks (both manual and thinking) faster, more accurately and at a fraction of the cost.

For the past few years, I believed that jobs would split into two camps: highly tech roles and deeply human-centred roles. But as things stands and on the current trajectory this distinction is blurring fast and AI is already doing parts of both. I am now less convinced that this separation will hold. The idea, raised by several experts, that we are building something which could eventually replace is, no longer seems like science-fiction.

I am not suggesting a dystopian collapse where robots take over (although some are and quite eloquently) but I am curious about a future world that may no longer need humans in the way we assume it does. A future which we cannot really visualise or describe at the moment.

This is not a pessimistic view, I think it is a realistic one and raises the question that is quite uncomfortable: If machines can excel at all that we do, what is exactly left that is uniquely human?

So here are some questions that I hope to will spark some debate:

1. What happens to a society when productivity and the creation of wealth no longer depends on humans?

2. If work stops being an organising force of life, what replaces it? Can we envisage a world where humans do not work?

3. With the US, China and Europe taking very different approaches to AI development and regulation, can anyone realistically govern what is coming?

4. And how does a small country like Malta, position itself in a future that even the largest countries currently struggle to conceptualise?

I am not sure we are anywhere near ready for the scale of change that we are going to face but I am genuinely interested in understanding what conversations should we be having now, before events begin shaping us instead.