The rapid ascent of generative AI, exemplified by ChatGPT reaching 100 million users in just two months, marks an extraordinary chapter in a decades-long technological narrative. During a pivotal lecture series hosted by Gresham College, economist and researcher Daniel Susskind dissects how this burst of progress is not a sudden anomaly but the result of a "relentless" expansion of machine capabilities into tasks once deemed exclusively human. Historically, the pursuit of artificial intelligence began with a "purist" mindset, solidified during the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, where the goal was to simulate human intelligence by painstakingly copying the way the human brain thinks and reasons. This era produced "expert systems," such as the first commercially available legal AI developed by Richard Susskind in the 1980s, which relied on manually crafted decision trees with millions of branches based on rules derived from human specialists.
Related article - Uphorial Shopify
The paradigm shifted significantly in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov, signaling the start of the "Pragmatist Revolution". Unlike the purists, pragmatists realized that machines could outperform humans by processing 330 million moves a second—effectively "flying without flapping their wings" rather than mimicking human intuition or creativity. This breakthrough exposed a fundamental misunderstanding in economics known as the "artificial intelligence fallacy": the mistaken belief that if a human cannot articulate the rules, they follow to perform a task (such as driving or making a medical diagnosis), then a machine cannot automate it. Susskind notes that while economists previously categorized such activities as "non-routine" and un-automatable, modern systems now use pattern recognition and brute force to perform medical diagnoses and identify objects more accurately than human experts.
This shift has forced even leading thinkers like Douglas Hofstadter to reconsider their skepticism regarding AI’s ability to compose music or translate languages without "real understanding" or complex human emotions. As Susskind explained to his audience at Gresham College, the primary impact of this revolution is a phenomenon called "task encroachment". AI is no longer limited to basic routines; instead, it is gradually moving into manual, cognitive, and even affective domains, which involve our capacity for feelings and emotions. While technology provides a helpful "complementing" force that can increase the demand for human work, the pragmatist revolution has significantly bolstered the "substituting" force that displaces workers from specific activities. The challenge for the next decade is not necessarily mass unemployment, but rather an evolving labor market where traditional roles sit increasingly out of reach for those who do not adapt to this relentless process of encroachment.
