We will all have more leisure time in the future

Maxims and arrows →Go uptown Our future. Pity the poor robo-slave (out of picture): having to watch the idiot meatware mangle a basic Spassky/Fischer opening must 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 more recently erstwhile DB boss John Cryan and heir to the Susskind professional clairvoyance dynasty Daniel Susskind that robots and artificial intelligence will, shortly, entirely supplant the need for human labour.

Thus, our 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 manage business change programmes, we will loaf around instead, playing chess and drinking grappa in the Peloponnese, the way Mediterranean pensioners have since time immemorial.

Sounds great, doesn’t it! (Best not to dwell on the thought that the robo-slave serving the grappa and wiping our arses could wipe the floor with us at chess, too, if it wanted to.)

Now if something about this scenario nudges your implausibility hooter, you would not be alone: there are at least two of us.

For one thing, from our vantage point, the last thirty-odd years have been one long technological Cambrian explosion, but so far no sign of extra leisure time. Indeed, it has been quite the opposite experience.

There is more work now than ever.

Granted, a lot of it is crap work: internal audit, software change management and operations analytics might not be the effervescent future we envisaged as wild undergraduate dreamers — but had anyone known, would they have told us? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Knowing our actual future might have crushed the very will to power within each of us, like a painted flower.

In any case, that was then: now that book of work is here, it is overwhelming, and it is well and truly barricading the way to that chessboard in Στούπα.

And isn’t this the point? No-one knows what we might wind up doing in ineffable, co-evolving future: for all we know it might not be regulatory change programme management — but, ahhh, don’t bet on it — but if the past, ancient and modern, is any guide there will be something, it will be tedious, and it sure as hell ain’t going to be chugging génépi over a backgammon board in the Haute-Savoie.

“Ahh,” sayeth the digital prophets of our time, “but is the past any guide? We say it is not. This time is different. This time the machines will not just be our handmaidens; they will replace us altogether.”

Okay; let’s run with that for now. Even if that is right, 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 won’t 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;

But the theory isn’t right. These assumptions are transparently absurd. They get the Yngwie Malmsteen paradox 180° back to front. the more information processing power we have, the more complicated our information structures will be. This is because we are lazy, backward-looking creatures. Increasing automation increases complexity, multiplies the interconnectivity between components of our distributed systems, accelerates the speed at which data circulates, and tightens the couplings between components. The JC has been harping on about systems theory and complexity in recent times, but it is clear that artificial intelligence can’t solve complex problems. They can only make them worse.

In an Nutshell™: put away the checkerboard and stick the limoncello back in the cupboard. There’s work to do.

See also

• Rubbish maxims
• Technological unemployment
• This time is different
• Perspective chauvinism
• [[Systems theory]