AI and Social Cohesion: Threat to Mankind?

This article outlines recent developments in AI from various positive and negative perspectives, examining its impact on the weather, on warfare, in the workplace, in the classroom, and in agriculture. It explores how such developments will impact employment by using AI to replace workers and professionals and outlines how those developments are already having an impact particularly on call centres. AI, with its capacity to create fake news and fake people, is likely to impact on communication and on relationships. This will lead to a loss of trust for key figures through the capacity of AI to be used malignly as a means of punishing, manipulating, or controlling others. The blurring of the boundary between illusion and reality and the replacement of individuals with robotics and bots in the workplace will affect the population's relationship with employers, politicians, and other powerful figures. This article considers the likely societal and global threat on populations in terms of social cohesion and explores whether the introduction of Universal Basic Income, which is being trialled extensively in various countries, would be one way of providing the stability that loss of employment will bring.