There’s a pretty good and thoughtful piece over at The Critic magazine about AI and the idea of Universal Basic Income. Whilst there is little doubt that the at present putative technology of AI will bring changes to the world, the world that AI might create might rob humans of agency.
Alex Story opens his piece with his description of a big meeting with President Trump and many of those in the forefront of AI developments. In this piece he touches on Elon Musk’s conversion to the idea of every human receiving a Universal Basic Income to compensate for so many jobs becoming in the future, dominated by AI and robotics.
Mr Story poured a great deal of cold water on the fantasies of the mega rich about Universal Basic Income. He said:
“If implemented in full, the universal income feels like one of those progressive, emancipatory changes that would rob us of meaning — that complex mixture of paranoia, confidence, fear of failure, desire to perform, all coated by a faith that keeps the principal moving forward regardless of adversity.
Musk is a current living embodiment of the constant duality in which life and death encompass the whole. Indeed, he succeeded against a world that, often enough, wished him to fail. He worked and pushed his workers to the edge of their capabilities in defiance of the powerful defenders of the status-quo.
A universal wage would kill the instincts that are the core components of his rise, and to that of so many others, without whom the human story would not be worth telling. “
Mr Story is in my view correct. The idea that all humanity could become a leisured class with no need to strive looks to me less of a dream and more like a nightmare. In any event humans are not machines. Many humans take badly to enforced comfort and look instead for stuff that is uncomfortable but exciting in order to fill their time. The West is wealthy beyond the imagination of those who lived in the West of about 300 years ago. We have wonders that the people back then could not have foreseen and the ordinary person lives in the sort of comfort that only the very rich could achieve in 1726. However that wealth and comfort has not prevented the growth of political extremism nor conflicts both within nations or between them. The lesser scale of things like famines in places like the West have not made the world a better place, it’s made it an easier place to live but it hasn’t taken away the desire of some humans to go out and disrupt.
I tend to agree with Mr Story in his conclusion that a world with no need to strive, no need to compete and no need to do anything other than sit back and receive your Universal Basic Income would not only enslave humanity but create a whole army of slaves with idle hands. It is highly likely as Mr Story says that this army of slaves with enforced idle hands would find an awful lot of devils who would find work for these hands.
Link
Alex Story’s piece in The Critic.
https://thecritic.co.uk/marx-musk-and-the-death-of-meaning/
I see it slightly differently. With a UBI you can do what you want at a basic level. You should be able to live, eat, watch TV, play games and spend your time doing what you want within financial limits. Some will be artists, music, sculpting, etc. But if you want to work to earn extra money and buy some luxuries, better house, trips abroad, then you can.
Kids already spend a lot of time stuck in bedrooms and playing games. So it is us older farts that have an issue with it. We can adapt and eventually we will be gone anyway. The younger ones will be more integrated with technology and find it easier.
Regardless, in the longer term it is inevitable that a large proportion of the population will not work. Robots will get cheaper, more dexterous and will do all the more mundane work. We will all have robots in our homes to clean, cook, do the ironing and repairs. If the homeowner wants he could do it himself but doesn’t have to. Mid level jobs will also be within the reach of robots soon. Then over 80% of the workforce won’t have the intellectual horsepower to do the jobs the robots can’t do.
As long as we resist the urge to make a do all robot, give it autonomy and the ability to self repair we will be fine. This is the part I worry about. Our species does stupid things just because we can.
I very much admire your optimism. Yes it would be good to have a world where those who want to be creative have the means and opportunity to do so. This has happened in the past in Britain where the Youth Opportunity Programme was used by some participants to gain a foothold in the creative industries.
The problem is not everyone is a potential creative who would use the freedom given to them by UBI. As the article said there will be a lot of devils making lots of work for idle hands.
There are positives but also negatives that could come out of the AI and robotics revolutions. I can see the positives but I can also see the negatives.
BTW AI has indeed reached into the intellectual area. I have sometimes made use of an AI Rabbi for answers to religious questions but I always check the answer or at least check the Robot Rabbi’s sources.