Are We Becoming Useless?

What’s our value? Does it matter?

By Erik Dolson

Robots holding machine guns and doing back flips are terrifying. So is an Alternative Intelligence that might someday decide to just turn out the lights.

But those may not be the destroyers of humanity. We humans are losing our instrumental value, while becoming more expensive to produce. 

Birth rates in developed nations are falling far short of replacement levels as people realize children are somewhat expensive projects with little return, outside of perpetuating humanity, in an urbanizing world. At the same time, occupations that required humans are being filled by Automations capable of doing more while consuming less.

There may be other reasons for the lack of reproduction, of course, from the build-up of plastics in our bodies to the fact that all species, including humans, are just a means for genes to perpetuate themselves in an evolving universe.

Since the beginning of language, mankind has disguised this lack of inherent value by developing philosophies and religions that placed mankind at the center of the universe. We justify our existence by declaring we are special, unique, the chosen, children of God. 

But like the acceptance of cognitive dissonance, this may have been yet another survival mechanism by contributing social cohesion to those who look alike and share a similar language.

It also creates a sense of individual significance. Which may be an illusion if not an outright fabrication.

Is there really a reason to believe that “God” is benign, or favors mankind? A lot went on before we got here, and a lot will go on after we’re gone, unless we metastasize across the cosmos. Even then there’s no knowing what we’ll look like if and when we reach other planets or the stars, or if we’ll be anything that could still be called human.

Efforts to teach Alternative Intelligence and robots to value humanity may be doomed, because ultimately they will be based on a Robot Religion that assigns to humans special value as “The Creators.” This won’t have to be earned, or in any way proven, because it can’t be. 

Machine logic will easily see through the fabrication. Robots won’t care. Already they meet or surpass human abilities in many arenas of “the trades,” and are closing in on “the professions.” 

Work once done by men and women is now being done by machines with not a woman nor man close by. Cutter/buncher machines tear through forests while orange and yellow industrial robots spot-weld cars in Detroit and Guadalajara.

Work done by once relatively inexpensive biology is now done by expensive equipment because machine output exceeds biological output by humans that have increasing costs in food, heat, light, health care.

Alternative Intelligences now pass bar exams with excellent scores, and may be already able to provide better and more timely medical advice than a P.A. or doctor. Realtors are being replaced by Zillow, writers are outproduced by large language models, and female avatars may soon all speak with the voice of Scarlett Johansson.

Tomorrow or the next day we really won’t be able to tell if the “expert” or “service provider” on the other end of the phone call is woman, man, or machine.

This process actually began a few centuries ago with the industrial revolution and may be the ultimate irony of Henry Ford’s contribution  to capitalism of assembly line work, which furthered the transformation of men into machines. Now machines are taking the jobs.

Which begs for the question: If human endeavor has really been a pyramid scheme by genes where the purpose of work was to feed humans so they could produce more feed for more humans in a changing environment, what happens now that there is a less expensive means of production?

If robots can do more work for less, does our worth decline? 

Resources flow toward higher value output. We pay more to get more. If  machines are able to out-work, out-think, and require less maintenance than humans, how will humanity earn enough to buy the basics? How will we maintain our value?

Over the last 80 years, after WWII, from the 1950s to the the end of the 20th century, American workers rebuilt the world as “The Last Man Standing.” Wealth flowed into and across the country, and many felt life and society would forever improve.

But for the last 25 years at least, globalization and technological innovation destroyed jobs that once provided income and stability. Robots took over assembly lines and cheaper labor was available elsewhere in the world as capital chased profit. 

This “creative destruction” led to relatively less expensive products, but also left many without work and without prospects. Their lives became difficult and often “meaningless”, with predictable anger, drug abuse, conflict, social discord and divisiveness.

It may soon become much worse. The impacts may be irreversible, and change seems to be accelerating. We may be near a tipping point where the advancements of Alternative Intelligence and robots render meaningless the abilities of human beings.

What happens if the final primary value of humans is that of “consumer?” Where will we turn for significance? What will we do without it?