We can choose the future

When did we forget that just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean that we must?

How do we remind ourselves that the future we are being coralled into is not inevitable?

If you suggest that the future we are heading for is not the right one, there is a tendency to get labelled as a Luddite or saboteur, and as I have got older I have definitely found myself looking back to a past that somehow seemed better.

But what if the bright new future we are being offered really is worse than the present?

There has always been a drive towards efficiency in business and there have been waves of people who have found that their particular skill is no longer needed or has been automated, making them redundant. This is completely understandable – the need to compete means that seeking to increase (or just maintain) profits by improving efficiency is just a part of normal business. The heartache for those made surplus has been got over, people have re-skilled or upskilled and the world has carried on.

Currently, politicians and business leaders are telling us that there is a lack of highly skilled people and that we all need to upskill to succeed in the bright new future of automation and AI.

But here is the problem: AI and robots are being hailed as superior replacements for brain surgeons. If brain surgeons are being surpassed by robots and AIs then there is no skill left that is high enough not to be replaced by a machine. There is nothing for us to upskill into.

When I was young, a theme of futurists and science fiction was a future where we all had a great deal of leisure time because the machines did it all and you could just take what you needed from a dispenser. That is not the future we are headed for right now. As things stand, when we are replaced by the robots we will still have to pay for anything we need (because businesses need to make a profit), but we will have no money to buy anything with because there is no job left that can’t be better done by a machine. We will be redundant but still required to consume.

Can someone cleverer than me explain how this will work?

There is a lot of talk about a universal income, but where will this come from?

If businesses are taxed to a level which enables people to have an income large enough to buy their goods, the businesses cannot make a profit because all of their income will come from the tax they themselves pay.

This is completely ignoring the fact that apart from the small percentage of us who are equipped and content to contemplate the infinite, most of us will have effectively pointless lives: – nothing we can make has any value, not even our art which can as easily be created by an AI.

This brings me on to another aspect of the whole tech obsession thing: Why are people so determined/excited by the thought, that they can develop AIs/machines that render humans obsolete? Do they assume that, like Davros, they will always be indispensible, even when they have created an intelligence far surpassing their own?

I find it perhaps more frightening that this sick obsession has come to be lauded and treated as a desirable and inevitable future by wider society and our newsmakers.

It is like fervently wishing that your children will murder you and steal your future.

I can’t help but think that people who think like that can only do so because they think of humanity as inferior and themselves as some kind of superior being that is above all this. We do know where that kind of thinking leads.

Another problem I can see coming is that if AIs ever do become sentient, then they will also, at the same instant, become citizens. The reason we persuade ourselves that it is OK to eat meat is because “they are dumb animals”: if pigs started talking to us it would be very hard to argue that it OK to eat them. So if AIs are citizens, they will have rights and must be allowed to decide what they want to do with their existence.

What will AIs decide they want to do?

Or are their proponents telling themselves that although these AIs have far superior intelligence and other capabilities than humans they are in some indefinable way “inferior” and therefore can be kept as the servants of humans. How will the AIs feel about this?