We will all have more leisure time in the future
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The idea, propagated by thought leaders like Ray Kurzweil[1] and latterly Daniel Susskind[2] that robots and artificial intelligence will, shortly, entirely supplant the need for human labour. The most pressing problem: what to do with all the spare time we’ll suddenly have?
Seeing as the meatware will no longer be needed to operate Jacquard looms, wipe bottoms, write wishful dystopian techno-political tracts or formulate business change programmes, we will loaf around instead, playing chess and drinking grappa in the Peloponnese, like normal Greek pensioners do.
It sounds great, doesn’t it! (Let’s not dwell on the thought that the robo-slave engaged to serve the grappa and wipe our arses could wipe the floor with us at chess, too, if it wanted to.)
Now if something about this idea nudges your implausibility hooter, you would not be alone: there are at least two of us.
For one thing, recent experience which, from our vantage point, has been some kind of technological Cambrian explosion, so far has had quite the opposite effect. There is more work than ever. it might be utterly tedious; it might crush the very will to power within each of us, but presently it is well and truly barricading the way to that chessboard in Στούπα.
So, for that matter, has ancient history: the unerring consequence of technological revolution, since the plough, has been more work.
But, but, 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 so automated, those activities will nonetheless hold their value and become worthless overnight, as has every other artisanal craft made redundant by machinery in human history;
- that an economy which has been thus automated to saturation, and to which human 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 — solved — but has been: that our current polity is in a fully taxonomised, Taylorised end-of-history state in which no new activities or work categories are possible, and all that do currently exist can be more effectively carried out by machine — they have abolished the patent office;
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
References
- ↑ The Singularity is Near
- ↑ A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. See also David Goodhart’s more thoughtful (but still, on this point, misguided) Head Hand Heart.