Qui Reponendi Sunt Te Salutant - Part Five

[Part One]
[Part Two]
[Part Three]
[Part Four]

The double edge sword of AI and automation means fewer humans needed in the work force.

For dangerous and / or dull jobs this is great:  Let machines do the dirty deadly stuff faster / more efficiently / cheaper than humans.

But AI and automation will chomp into other jobs as well.  How many janitors will it take to clean a building when one person can do it sitting behind a desk, supervising hundreds of remote control mops ala “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”?

The claim AI will create new jobs and occupations, while doubtlessly true, ignores what it will do immediately to the transitional generations, much the same way the Industrial Revolution steamroller hundreds of thousands of artisans and skilled laborers into a newer, more compact workforce.

Automations are the ultimate labor force:  Once past the initial investment, there’s only a small cost in upkeep and energy supply, yet they can work 24 / 365 without tiring or taking breaks.

Best of all, when they become outmoded, they can be disassembled and recycled. 

Try doing that with
a bagger at
a supermarket.

Herein lays the paradox and challenge:

Humans want the luxury to pursue their own interests; even if they choose to pursue dangerous / difficult things. They want to do so of their own free choice.

AI and automation can provide the labor needed to keep a society functioning, thus giving millions, perhaps billions more than enough time and necessary basic needs to follow personal pursuits.

If everyone enjoys the luxury of freedom from labor, there is no status in being able to afford such luxury.

If there are millions, perhaps billions of people with no ostensible purpose other than their own satisfaction, why encourage continued population growth since it will only continue to put strains on both the economic and ecological systems?

Why then encourage mass consumerism the way capitalism has for the last three hundred years?

If there is not only no need for mass consumerism but rather a host of rational reasons to discourage it, why should capitalism continue to be the economic model for humanity?

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years ago our ancient ancestors looked at the moon and tried to reach it by climbing the highest trees they could find.

Later, when they built simple tools and the rudiments of civilization, they tried with towers, or by epic journeys atop the highest mountains or over the horizon to see where the moon went.

Eventually humanity came to understand that the moon lay beyond our conventional reach, that none of the old ideas for reaching it could ever possibly work.

Soon other ideas for reaching it sprang forth; bottles of dew strapped to one’s body, balloons, giant cannons, aeroplanes, event rockets, as small and as impractical as they were.

But we developed the rockets, and they became larger, more reliable, and eventually they took us to the moon.

From the 1840s, the idea of a communist society, one where social classes and money no longer existed, where the state withered away, has circulated.

In those days, and in Marx’ time, and in Soviet Russia and the Iron Curtain nations, it was the tree we sought to climb to reach a seemingly unobtainable goal.

With the failures of those efforts, capitalists laughed, claiming it was impossible to reach those heights and that we were fools to even try instead of rooting around in the mud and filth like them.

AI and automation may be our rockets.  Already AI programs manage money accounts better than humans.  Without the false need to make profit for the few at the expense of the many, they may usher in that long sought age.

The danger between now and then is that those on the top, seeing one last expense to cut loose, might deem it personally reasonable to hasten the reduction of the human species by direct means.

The future stares us in the face.

Don’t blink.

© Buzz Dixon