I HAVE believed in the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for a long time. I invested in Nvidia and other key companies since 2020, and now we are at the point where it is on everybody’s feed.
Institutions have piled in, and governments are trying to exert their dominance over their AI supply chains (or lack thereof). And they are doing this because they know it won’t end with Artificial Cognition.
What is coming next is robotics. Where AI is the brain, what comes next is the body. What is holding that back is the existing economic structure, which was created for mass human labor participation.
Mass producing robots will allow those robots to create more robots, who will then create more robots for maintenance and coordination. The only constraint, at that point, would be energy and raw materials. Human labor would play a small, compressed role in that process, but most of the productive economy will be done by machines.
For those countries actually creating the robots, this will lead to a great (and painful) transition, as their labor markets are forced to adapt to the changes. Many trade workers may soon join many office workers as both AI and robotics will take over their roles.
For us in the Philippines, this can mean different things, depending on how we react. The positive scenario will be to go through the same transition as those countries who have already embraced AI and mass robotics. We will go through the same painful process of economic restructuring, but I believe the effects of commercial robotics will be necessary to participate in the economics of the future.
The other scenario is that we are left behind, for one reason or another, and we would not be able to offer anything except obsolete services that belong in the past decade.
An AI robotics economy will not eliminate human labor. It will, however, re-price mass labor participation and the world will need even less of labor arbitrage that has made our overseas Filipino workers and business process outsourcing so lucrative these past decades.
In short, what I believe the Philippines needs now is to retrain our entire labor force, young and old, so that we are better prepared to meet an economy dominated by AI and robotics./PN
