Many jobs may be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. New jobs will need to be created that provides people with meaningful employment.
The Art of Tracking may be one of the last human cognitive skills that AI will be able to replicate (if ever). Even if it were possible to replicate human tracking skills, it may not be economically viable. For example, the Concord jet was technologically more sophisticated than the Boeing airliner, but it could not compete in the open market. Or even if AI could replicate human tracking skills, it does not mean that it should. The Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman argues that investment in AI may crowd out millions of jobs because the same investment could have been invested in industries that create more jobs than AI. From a socio-economic point of view, the investment required to replicate human tracking skills may be better spent subsidizing jobs for Indigenous communities and community science.
Most important of all, the art of tracking involves an immersive human experience, including intuition and creativity. Tracking may not only be the origin of science – it stimulates the imagination and we enjoy telling stories about our interactions with wild animals. To understand and predict the movements of the animal we track, we ask ourselves “what would I do if I were this animal?” and we experience the feeling of becoming the animal. It is this immersive human experience that AI will not be able to replicate.
In the age of social media and AI, tracking may be the ideal activity to ensure the psychological health of young people.
Rather than trying to replicate human tracking skills, we should focus on developing world models that can augment human trackers to make their skills more valuable. This would be consistent with the human-centric philosophy of our CyberTracker software.
Subsidized job creation for unemployed people to work as trackers could provide them with meaningful and fulfilling work. Following Keynesian macroeconomic principles, this could help to stimulate the economy, creating additional jobs and reducing inequality. The global ecosystem, containing millions of animal and plant species with rich behavior and interactions within a rapidly changing environment in the face of climate change, is infinitely complex, providing the opportunity to create an unlimited number of jobs. The number of jobs will depend only on the limits of the global macroeconomy to sustain them through a redistribution of wealth, which is ultimately a political choice.
Engaging people in the preservation of life itself could be one of the most meaningful opportunities to deal with potential large-scale unemployment.
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