In my last comment column I pointed out how labour displacing technologies (LDTs) were already an inexorable force throughout the advanced economies. But where will this trend take us? For instance, repeated warnings by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are powerful and compelling – and in his job he really ought to know.
In all modern societies the economic relationship is central to a stable, ordered and rewarding existence. People contribute primarily to the common good, not through family or community – but through holding down a useful job. Take away a system reliant on the majority of the population being in a job and the fabric of society will crumble. The central purpose of existence will be lost and all the prospects that the economic system had once offered people though their careers will no longer sustain their lives. They will just slip back into idleness, drugs and discontent. A world in which 10% of the population owns 80% or more of the world’s wealth will no longer be tolerated. The rising world population will also put increasing pressure on resources and people will (indeed must) in the end rebel – and widescale chaos ensue.
This is not scaremongering or sensationalism – but a logical outcome of a trend that is well underway. The big social experiment is already present in the many western countries where youth unemployment has climbed to over 20% – and even 50% in extreme cases such as Greece. Those unemployed in this age group not only do not have jobs, but will probably never know what it is like to work – at least in a regular job. It is no coincidence that drug culture and rising crime rates are associated with widescale youth unemployment. We even take it for granted that it is virtually impossible to move around safely in numerous urban areas from the poorest banlieues of Paris, to Bolivia’s El Alto, Baltimore or the run down heart of Doncaster or Limerick. As shops close they get filled with sleazy establishments that perpetrate the decay. There is barely any German city that does not have its red light district or city park that is not filled with drug dealers ignored by the police and seeding their contagious brand of nihilism.
AI is just a mechanism that will ensure a technologically assured destruction (TAD) and removal of most human beings from acting as the arbiters of their own lives. Yes, it will help to improve medical diagnoses, reduce queues at supermarket checkouts and allow the automated movement of road vehicles. But equally it will invade the spheres of even professional know-how – depriving first accountants, then lawyers and architects and finally most IT specialist of their jobs. It will also allow the surveillance and control of our lives that will make normal existence intolerable.
In the end, those with wealth or in political positions will not be able to hold back the breach in the dam of human frustration and purposelessness and all vestiges of the old social order will be swept away. No arrangement for the social wage could ever mollify those deprived of a credible and significant role in society and the dignity of paid employment. In the rapidly advancing future there will be no space for hope, every risk of famine and other human disasters. It will be no satisfaction for Musk, I and others to say “I told you so” – or provide any room for regret by executives who once sat on the crest of a relentless automation.