We will all have more leisure time in the future

Maxims and arrows →Go uptown Our future. Pity the poor robot serving the grappa and periodically wipe our arses: having to watch the idiot meatware mangle a basic Spassky/Fischer opening will be some kind of torture. A hearty collection of the JC’s pithiest adages. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Maxim Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

The idea, propagated by thought leaders like Ray Kurzweil and latterly Daniel Susskind that robots and artificial intelligence will entirely supplant the need for human labour, and in the near term. Seeing as the meatware will no longer be needed to operate Jacquard looms, wipe bottoms, write wishfully dystopian technological tracts or formulate business change programmes, we will loaf around instead playing chess and drinking grappa in the Peloponnese, like modern-day Greek pensioners. It sounds great, doesn’t it! But problem: there’s even a machine to play chess for you.

But if something about this idea nudges your implausibility hooter, you would not be alone. There’s at least two of us. For one thing our recent history, which from our unimpeachable present vantage point resembles some Cambrian explosion of novel technologies, has so far had quite the opposite effect. So, for that matter, has ancient history: the unerring consquence of technological revolution has been more work.

But this time is different.

The theory of technological unemployment assumes:

• that all labour activities in the economy can, and before long, will have been articulated in such a way that they can be entirely, reliably and cheaply carried out by artificial intelligence;
• that once they have been automated, those labour activity will nonetheless hold their value;
• that an economy which has been thus automated, and to which the majority of participants no longer contribute, will still function more or less as normal, and
• that, in other words, an entire economy not only can be fully determined but has been solved: that our current polity is in some kind of fully taxonomised, Taylorised end-of-history state in which no new activities or work categories can emerge, and all that do currently exist can be more effectively carried out by machine.

These three assumptions being transparently absurd, this gets the Yngwie Malmsteen paradox 180° back to front. Increasing automation will create more risk, not less; will generate more complexity not less, and more potential for catastrophe, not less. We will all be kept busy.

See also

• Rubbish maxims
• Technological unemployment