Those of us who have serious concerns, or even fears, about the future we face as AI becomes part of our world are wildly diverse: these fears and concerns are, after all, all over the map. There’s much about AI, what it is, what it doing already, what it might become and how we might be affected to spark those reactions.
I’ve already written about my belief that AGI (artificial general intelligence) will arrive sooner rather than later, and shared my deep concern that when it does, it will already be what we would call superintelligence – able to solve problems across domains better than we can. If it plays out that way, there’s no chance we’ll be ready for it; the impact will be overwhelming, both economically and socially.
That’s enough to keep me (and many others) up at night; but there’s another concern about the breakneck progress of AI that’s greater still: there are those among us, particularly in political leadership, who are not well-disposed to accommodate the Western economy in the face of the changes AI are unquestionably going to impose on it.
Now that AI has crossed over from physical tasks to cognitive tasks – and now that it understands and responds to human speech – an entirely new domain of utility has opened up. AI can write emails, essays, reports, news articles, blog posts, ads, screenplays, even love letters. In short, AI in a single leap has entered the workplace, able to do (by some expert estimates) as much as 30 percent of an office employee’s tasks.
AI can already replace entire departments in an organization; back-end operations in insurance and healthcare administration are being completely automated. The service industry will lose 87 percent of its employees by 2030, according to an Obama Administration report.
Goldman Sachs recently issued a report estimating that 300 million jobs are about to go away. That’s more than 10 percent of the global workforce. Some estimates say the losses will hit 50 percent by 2050. Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET puts it as high as 80 percent.
This massive shift in the capitalist equation won’t happen this year or next. But we’ll be feeling its effects within the next two election cycles, and a decade from now we’ll be scrambling, as owners and shareholders embrace the radical reduction of payrolls, trained college graduates begin competing with teenagers for rapidly-vanishing minimum-wage positions, and the gap between rich and poor widens all the more.
And now we’ve arrived at my great fear.
That capitalist equation can’t persist if the entire definition of labor changes, and the machine begins taking over management as well. And how do economic ideologues define human beings? By their labor. What will it mean to be human, if we can no longer define ourselves by what we produce?
That’s a question we never should have had to ask, and it is to Western society’s shame that it ever had anything to do with production. Our ultimate value is, has always been, and will always be infinitely more than what we do for money. But the cliff we’re racing toward is going to force that evaluation into the light.
And it will fall into the hands of the most egregiously inept, self-serving, and corrupt body of decision makers in living memory: the US Congress.
The rise of AI in the equation of economic prosperity is troubling: it represents potential prosperity across a spectrum, but first and foremost for the already-wealthy, those who own the industries that will be tooling up with it and releasing human employees back into the ether through an increasingly-rapid attrition, as the technology shoots forward and the sophistication of AI training reaches new heights. That class, already ascendant over the general population in obscene proportion, will be at leisure to increase that proportion further still, as the options of those below swiftly recede.
One thing, and one thing only, stands between that outcome and a more equitable, human one: federal law.
A new mandate can prevail, to ensure the flourishing of US citizens in the face of diminishing employment and a radical revisioning of the business landscape. It can potentially include a number of steps to mitigate the transitional hardships: the universal basic income, and/or negative income tax; the taxation of all corporate-owned robots and AIs deployed commercially; federally-incentivized cooperatives to balance the human drain of corporate automation.
All these government interventions could do much to smooth this inevitable path. And US action in this domain would, of course, provide a template for other democracies facing the same overwhelming challenges.
But we are now faced with a danger just as harrowing and dread-inducing as the encroachment of AI itself: a legislative branch that is so divided, so ideologically entrenched, that it cannot cope with the economic realities surrounding it today – let alone the radical actions it will be asked to consider just a couple of presidencies from now.
“The political environment in the United States has become so toxic and divisive that agreement on even the most conventional economic policies seems virtually impossible,” wrote AI pundit Martin Ford. “A guaranteed income is likely to be disparaged as ‘socialism’,” and “The decades-long struggle to adopt universal health coverage in the United States probably offers a pretty good preview of the staggering challenge we will face in attempting to bring about any whole-scale economic reform.”
The Republican majority of the House of Representatives is currently playing chicken with the debt ceiling, threatening a US default on its obligations that would set off a global economic crisis, to blackmail the White House and Democrats into budget concessions it is unable to achieve through proper legislative process. They are willing to wreak havoc in order to assert themselves, absent majority support in the citizenry, for the sake of domination. They don’t even care about the concessions they’re so hell-bent on achieving; if they retake the Senate and the White House, they’ll run rough-shod over both the deficit and the national debt the next day.
Do we really expect these men and women, overseen by shameless panderers, who include an extremist wing populated by blackmailers, predators, despot wannabes and breathtaking nincompoops, who can’t handle the economy responsibly even under well-established and familiar conditions, to forsake their donor masters and rabid voting bases to take bold and unprecedented action to preserve the economic security of the citizenry overall? Do we really expect lawmakers who have no interest in legislating in the first place to support a socioeconomic agenda that would make the New Deal look downright austere?
This confrontation isn’t likely to happen in the 2020s. It may not happen until well into the 2030s. But as Bill Gates recently said, we tend to radically overestimate what’s going to change over the next two years, and radically underestimate what’s going to change in the next ten. This confrontation isn’t imminent; but it is certainly inevitable. The current system cannot endure.
We can wait to deal with it until it hits, or we can start taking action now.
When I was a boy, my toddler brother slipped under the radar and out of the house one summer day and climbed into the family car, sitting in the driveway. He managed to knock the car out of gear. It slowly lumbered backward, into the street, and bumped into a tree in the neighbor’s yard on the other side. No one was hurt, nor were they likely to be in that sleepy neighborhood. The tree wasn’t damaged. My little brother, oblivious to any danger, was gleeful. We tease him about it still from time to time.
My fear today is that the next time I see my brother, I’ll find myself thinking of the Speaker of the House...
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