"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." — Edwin Dijkstra
Folks, let's cut through the noise. We've all seen the sci-fi movies where robots rise up and snatch our jobs overnight, but that's not how it's playing out. No dramatic takeover with lasers and terminators. Instead, artificial intelligence has slithered into our workplaces like a thief in the night, doing the heavy lifting in creative, analytical, and advisory roles while humans pretend they're still in charge. The bosses? Many are clueless, sipping their coffee and signing off on "human" work that's mostly machine-made. I've seen it firsthand, and if you're not paying attention, you're about to get blindsided.
This somewhat histrionic essay from the aptly named "Economic Collapse Report” Substack, (He’s good. Go read him.) leans hard on the “We’re all gonna die” trope, but does offer a pretty solid precis of one of the standard fears about the burgeoning use of AI, which mirrors the other side of that particular coin, which is the hope that AI is going to free us from human drudgery and allow our true talents and intellects to soar.
Which begs the question of whether the bulk of mankind has intellects capable of soaring under any conditions, or talents capable of being developed no matter what drivers might be applied. Pushing on one end of a wet noodle is a mostly fruitless endeavor.
That said, technophiles have been thinking about, writing about, and hoping for the bright, gleaming future mankind has to look forward to when the machines take over, no matter how much technophobes loathe the very idea.
I, myself, back in the Ancient Days, had a story published in Analog Science Fiction called “Think Ethic,” in which AI did come along and free most humans from the dull labor of their everyday jobs, while generating so much wealth that financial concerns were no longer a limiting factor. If you wanted to sit at home in your mini-mansion and spend your days pounding Bud Lights, or soma, you could do so. If you wanted to likewise spend your time on esoteric mathematical theory, you could have at that, too.
The first part of the story, the setup, lightly covered the “takeover,” and the standard fears of mankind being rendered obsolete by machines that deprived humans of their birthright of hanging their own self-valuations on the labor they performed. Up till then, a man, when asked who he was, might respond, “I’m an engineer.” Or, less impressive, perhaps, but still honest labor, “I’m a ditch digger.” (Note the assumptions built into the term “honest labor”). In other words, human identity was inextricably bound up in what humans did for a living. Some things were highly prestigious, and others not so much. Human self-esteem tended to track on such evaluations, for better or worse.
Kipling, in the Gods of the Copybook Headings, said, “If you don’t work you die.” AI said, “You don’t need to work any more.”
The Triumph of The West is said to be grounded on The Protestant Work Ethic.
Less noted, but perhaps even more crucial, governments everywhere tend to fund themselves by extracting portions—sometimes very significant portions—of the financial fruits of the labor of their citizens. (The genesis of government in general is said to have been ancient outlaws and warlords conquering peaceful farmers, then confiscating part of their harvests for the privilege of being conquered. “That’s a nice crop you have there. We’ll protect it for you.”
Today, many major western economies are so desperate for warm human bodies that labor for the succor of the tax farming system that they import them in vast quantities, while instituting every more stringent systems of control to make sure the bodies generate such funds as are required.
What happens if the serfs are freed from their lives of endless indentured servitude? The labor theory of value is commie bunk, but what if labor itself becomes bunk? Now, admittedly, we starry-eyed SF writer/dreamers tended to handwave such concerns in favor of chronicling various facets of our imagined Brave New Utopias. In my Analog story, I posited that the result of freeing most of humanity from the need to perform drudge work would be an enormous upwelling of human creativity and accomplishment that would advance the lot of the human race to unimaginable levels. Some tinker-mathematician-amateur physicist would come up with a workable FTL drive. Another auto-didact bio-geneticist would finally unravel the problem of extreme life extension, and mankind would become a race of immortals. Death, where would thy sting be then?
Okay, I was young and nowhere as cynical as I am now, when one of my bywords, based on long experience, is that if humans can find a way to fuck it up, they will. And they always, always can find a way.
That is the significance of Dijkstra’s famous dictum that leads off this essay. Arguing whether AI really thinks (as humans understand the term) is about as useful, and relevant, as arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Infinitely more important is what Artificial Intelligence can do. And according to the Economic Collapse Report, it is already doing a very great deal. And will do a lot more in the very near future. And that Substacker is not at all happy about it.
AI has become something like the elephant in the famous parable of the blind men. Everybody sees some aspect of it, and reacts accordingly, but the overwhelming reality of the entire elephant squatting in the middle of their living room remains inherently beyond their reach or grasp.
The rapidly approaching confluence of The Fourth Turning, (basically a much expanded and explicated version of Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!) and The Singularity, (I don’t limit the event by calling it a “tech singularity” because it is much more than that) combine to provide a period unlike any ever seen before in human history. The Cycles of the Turnings have always existed, (along with many other historical cycles), but never has a Singularity accompanied one of their climactic existential crisis moments. The Singularity will affect everything. And no, I don’t think that prediction will turn out to be at all overblown. There are too many, and too complex, parts, cogs, wheels involved in the gargantuan, brittle, and chaotic historical, technological, ideological, economic, and religious globalmachine that is grinding to a climax over the next three or four years. Frankly, I don’t have a clue what the ultimate outcome will be, or what form(s) it will assume as it inevitably overtakes us and all our works and days.
So eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we…
My experience, especially with years of teaching college students, tells me that most people have no real "inner life" as such. At least they appear content to move through life as if it were a pinball, or perhaps Pachinko, game, bouncing off various parts of reality without much consideration until they get to the bottom permanently.
While doing so they accept whatever rewards or blows they get and simply move on
They rarely appear to even consider trying to "take charge" of their own life or maybe even alter it in any significant way.
So, when AI finally is doing most jobs, I expect most people to kind of fade away, enjoying what animalistic pleasures they can, until they die. And they die out. Without the need to "work to live" for most people, a great many won't live I fear.
I'm not really sure if that is bad for "humanity" or not.
Need an A.I. editor, or am I dense and missing a joke?: "Swiming With the Submarines"