We will all have more leisure time in the future

This idea, propagated by thought leaders like Ray Kurzweil, John Cryan and dashing young heir to the Susskind clairvoyance dynasty Daniel Susskind, posits that robots and artificial intelligence will, shortly, supplant the need for human labour altogether. We will shortly be technologically redundant. The lot of us.

Maxims and arrows Go Premium 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 Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Canards of modernity: an occasional series. No 1: We will all have more leisure time in the future.

Seeing as we won’t be working Jacquard looms, wiping arses, writing wishful dystopian techno-political tracts or managing business change programmes any more, what to do with all the spare time we’ll suddenly have?

On this view we will just loaf around, playing chess and drinking grappa, the way Mediterranean pensioners have since time immemorial. The challenge will be staying interested. Sounds great, doesn’t it! (Best not to dwell on the thought that the robo-slave serving the grappa and wiping our arses could also wipe the floor with us at chess, if it felt like it.)

In any case: nice non-work, if you can get it.

Now if something about this scenario nudges your implausibility hooter, that makes two of us.

For one thing, from our vantage point, the last thirty-odd years have been one long Cambrian explosion of technology (t’internet! iPhones! SETI@home! Uber! Drones!), but so far not a sign of any extra leisure time. Maybe it is just me, readers, but for this old goat it has been quite the opposite experience. '

Granted, a lot of it is crap work: internal audit, software change management, process excellence and operations analysis might not be the effervescent future we envisaged as wild undergraduate dreamers (but had our parents 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, there is more work to do now than ever. It is here, it is overwhelming, and it is barricading the way to that chessboard in Στούπα, with no end in sight.

As for that end: No-one knows what we will be doing in ineffable, co-evolving future. For all we know it might not be regulatory change programme management — though, ahhh, don’t bet on it — but, if the past is any guide, there will be something, it will be tedious, and it sure as hell won’t be slugging 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 you are right, thought leader types, your theory of technological unemployment assumes:

• that all human activity in the economy can be and, before long will have been, articulated in a way that can be entirely, reliably and cheaply carried out by artificial intelligence;
• that once they have been so articulated, 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 machines can look after those that do exist.

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 a lot recently, but these are not trivial problems. Artificial intelligence cannot solve them. We are going to be needed for a long time yet.

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

This article was written by a disembodied neural network. © 2020 Klaatu Barada Nikto.

See also

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