I remember once having a conversation with someone who was ecstatic about the prospects for artificial intelligence. "Wouldn't it be a perfect world," he said, "if machines could do all of the work that is currently being done by human beings, and we could all focus on leisure and recreation day in and day out..."
My response was that it depended on the attitude that humanity took towards such an invention. Because if the human work ethic were rendered obsolete in a Capitalist economy, then the working class would lose its only bargaining tool in the 21st century: its usefulness. And with that gone, its materialistic worth would be near zero. People are forced to live off of starvation wages today because that's the perceived value of the low-skilled work they do. That's how much they have to bargain with. And it's not a lot. How then would an economy in which their labor was essentially worthless treat them?
But to better understand what such a future would entail, one must first look to the past. The history of the computer is very intriguing. It was born of the darkest days of the Second World War, after France had fallen, and while the Battle of Britain was raging. As Winston Churchill predicted, "Upon this battle rests the fate of the world. Hitler must break us on this island or lose the war." And two inventions proved pivotal in changing the tide of that battle. The first was Radar, which allowed an out-manned and out-gunned British Royal Air Force to successfully predict when, where, and how many German Luftwaffe planes would be striking on any particular day. And the second was the brain-child of an obscure mathematician by the name of Alan Turing. He postulated that it would be possible to build what he called a "Turing Machine," that could run permutations faster and more reliably than an entire army of intelligence analysts. And so the first modern computer was born. It proved crucial in unraveling the German "Enigma Code" that was used to encrypt Nazi communications, and from it the British were able to read their enemy's war plans in their entirety like a book.
Mr Turing did more than just invent the modern day computer though. He also made a prediction that was startling at the time: that one day his invention would surpass even the human intellect in its computational capacity. From there it would continue to grow exponentially more capable by the year, until it had surpassed and supplanted all of humankind's collective mental abilities.
As of the Summer of 2014, the Turing Machine has been able to successfully fool a panel of experts into thinking it is a human being in a statistically significant portion of 5-minute-long conversations. What this means is that any text chat you have with someone on the internet that lasts less than 5 minutes could just as soon be a robot as a real person. That includes, for instance, romance hotlines, technical support forums, the comment sections of news stories and online videos, etc. And that 5-minute threshold is growing by the year.
But getting back to the economy, what exactly does all of this mean for the employment situation in the West? Well, to begin with, the current accusations of free trade agreements causing factory jobs to be exported overseas to China is not the whole truth. What they aren't telling the public is that factory jobs in China are disappearing as well. They're in fact disappearing everywhere around the globe; gobbled up by automation. They're also not telling people that the state of the economy is better than it ever has been, even as record numbers of people languish in unemployment and underemployment. Why? Because the ruling elite don't need the same huge workforce they used to. Again, automation technology has rendered it superfluous. Until now the service sector has been largely immune, but even that is beginning to change, as robocalls, automated customer care, self-service checkout lines, and other technologies begin to roll out. And professional jobs, like doctors and lawyers, are starting to feel the squeeze from emerging AI technologies as well. There are even sophisticated investment algorithms that are starting to compete with the capabilities of highly skilled bankers.
So where is all of this heading? Well, assuming things do not change, we are heading towards an era in which a literal handful of trillionaire geniuses enjoy opulence they couldn't possibly burn through in a hundred million years, while the other 99.99999% of humanity either lives off of handouts or takes turns digging ditches and filling them in again to keep from dying of boredom. That's if current trends do not change.
Of course, trends probably will change at some point. The question is: in what way? And that is a question that I as of yet have no answer for. One thing for sure, though, is that the human work ethic is headed for a slow and steady death, and that (for a while at least) the future will belong to whichever technocrats are best able to adapt to its demise.
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