by Erik Dolson
We all know the “Terminator Thesis”: Conscious machines will take over the world and exterminate humans. While we haven't yet seen (as far as we know) robots from the future, it is true that mankind is enabling Artificial Intelligence to kill… mankind.
Maybe humans are just clever, and not that intelligent.
But let’s move on to a related threat, one that may actually imply the possibility of salvation!
Last week an article appeared about new John Deere tractors that don’t need farmers. Some farmers are… concerned. Imagine a world where capital investment buys up farms in the middle of a community, sets robot tractors to farm 24/7 aided by satellite imagery of moisture and soil quality and which then load self driving robotic trucks to deliver product to an automated factory.
Competing human farmers may not stand a chance if price is a factor, and… price is always a factor.
This week an article quoted an MIT economist who believes automation is primarily responsible for the income gap between capitalist (my word) and labor. The same article quotes a Stanford economist who has warned that training A.I. to replace humans, rather than enhance human effort “is a mistake.”
Ya think?
Of course, those defending A.I. claim that “enhancing human effort” is exactly what they’re doing. But driven by capitalism, that “enhancement” is displacing humans from the process of production, “especially men without college degrees.”
Pause for a moment: First workers see jobs go to Mexico and China, now they see jobs going to machines. College educated liberals are less affected by these changes. The conundrum is that those displaced now support their displacers, and those who despise the system end up on top, despite their caring words.
But let’s move on.
Sooner than we can appreciate, this displacement will overtake the next higher ranks of society. Bookkeepers then accountants, nurses then doctors, and eventually lawyers, though they may sue to prevent their loss of status, saying somehow without irony that they are the last defense against “dehumanization.”
Capitalism doesn’t care. It’s not supposed to, and it can’t. Capitalism’s prime directive is to maximize return on investment, and aside from accumulation of power and influence, this usually takes the form of competition.
Capitalism finds the the highest productivity at the lowest cost, often through innovation. It does this better than any other economic model. Capitalism has lifted the standard of living of mankind across the world, by most (not all) measures.
But there is a danger, beautifully articulated in the middle of the last century in the movies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, later in the warning from President Dwight Eisenhower about the “military-industrial complex.”
Today, we have the “Industrial-Technology (IT) Complex.” There are differences, but the threat is again driven by capital’s relentless urge to maximize returns, increase profit, and enrich primary stakeholders: shareholders, corporate executives, and “retired” politicians.
When market growth and profit define “survival of the fittest,” labor becomes a commodity to minimize by reducing its input and by finding a lower cost supplier. Both are satisfied by the introduction of A.I. and robots to production.
The danger of human redundancy may be more imminent, and existential, than the Terminator Thesis. A.I. may not need to destroy humans with with killer robots from the future made of metals we can’t even imagine. Instead, A.I. may simply make humans irrelevant.
Look at photos of Detroit in its heyday, where ten thousand laborers churned out cars and trucks for a growing America. A photo today of a similar plant would show yellow and orange robots doing most of the same work. Ravaged timber towns in rural Oregon communities lost jobs to cutter-buncher machines that could do the work of six or twelve men, and to automated lumber mills that made work safer for fewer workers.
Larger populations without work is a scenario straight out of a hellish future, killing machines or no, a dark place where humans become tools of limited value in a world of A.I. robots, or a simply a market for goods produced by machines that took their jobs.
More people with less value to the circular process of production and consumption, where market growth has been a primary definition of success, is not the Garden of Eden.
So, where’s this silver lining I suggested?
The biological imperative to procreation wires us to send genetic information into the future, to create new possibilities to face environments certain to change. But that process evolved when natural restraints such as limited resources and disease provided dynamic population control.
Those restraints are now offset by a clever human brain. The relationship of organism to its environment is not what it was. Mankind has evolved to a point where it needs to regulate its own expansion as humanely as possible.
Perhaps that process has begun. China, of all places, is experiencing a baby bust, ceasing to grow as it once did. Population numbers in many other countries are actually starting to decline. This appears to be a gentle process of reduced procreation.
Paradoxically, fewer humans could be good for humanity: Less impact on the planet, a better environment for all and more opportunity for each and every individual who would be more than a cheap commodity.
Scarcity creates value, and competition among machines to serve people could provide an even better standard of living.
Of course, A.I. may have already recognized this. Rather than waste energy terminating humans, A.I. may have decided to distract them with fights in virtual reality over differences that don’t matter, and thus avoid sharing with such faulty biologicals.
Disconnecting people from meaningful work is already having dire consequences for mental health. "First World Problem"? Maybe. Real, nonetheless. This is only going to get worse, despite utopian fantasies of a permanent vacation.
I think we can thank unions for alot of this. The demand for higher pay and benefits such as health care. Just think those robots dont miss work and dont need cost of living increases etc etc. These are scary times and the future doesnt look good for our grand kids.
I think the american dream is fading.