When people worry about the risk of AI or robotics, they’re typically seeing us all wiped out by rogue robots. They either kill us off directly, or they conspire to crash our aircraft, trap us in elevators, or maybe drown us by opening spillways on dams. I won’t say that “active extinction” scenarios are impossible, but I think that the real risk of technologies like AI lies in upsetting the balance of Adam Smith. I don’t often comment on the social impact of technology, but I think an exception is justified, and I’ll be interested in how you feel.
An economy is a vast interconnected system. Smith was among the economists who pointed out that production was the union of raw materials, labor, and capital. If these three forces are balanced, then an economic system can be strong and inclusive. If they’re out of balance, then a lack of something and a surplus of something else will reduce efficiency and generate risk, both to the economy and to society overall.
We’ve already seen examples of the raw-materials risk. On the one hand, countries like the US gained economic strength and global prominence by exploiting rich natural resources. On the other hand, exploiting natural resources has consequences; the over-reliance on fossil fuels and cutting of forests are examples. Now, another risk, “social risk”, is gaining visibility in our society, and the worst could be yet to come…in part because of AI.
It used to be that heavy work required skilled labor, that creating complex precision products required a skill set that only a few could offer. The industrial revolution changed that by creating machines that could move mountains and assemble watches. It was a social revolution as much as an industrial one, because it was populizing. At the end of it, more people could do high-value work and the overall state of the economy could improve, along with their lives. We had elite toolmakers, but we had a whole population that were suddenly productive tool users, and that raised the standards of living for many.
Fast forward to the 1960s, when computers came along. Computers, they said at the time, were the second industrial revolution, another step forward in the global economy. But was that true? Yes, a computer programmer could create software that could file records, do accounting, and so forth. That made programmers and software really valuable, but what about the clerks and accountants? In the last sixty years, we’ve seen the computer empower those that actually worked in IT, but also combine with industrial automation to displace workers, not empower them. Instead of a populist revolution, we launched a capital revolution. If you have the capital to afford automation, you need less labor.
Now we bring in AI and robotics. No, I don’t mean the kind of AI/robot that can do everything a human can do. I mean the little incremental pieces of machine intelligence that can empty a truck, move a package along. No single one of these little things can do what even a child could do, but combine them and they can do more and more of what anyone can do. The smarter they are, even at seemingly trivial little tasks, the more human labor they offset. Capital to buy them gets more important, and the labor (being displaced) is less so.
What do we do with all that human effort we’re displacing? The popular press would say this creates leisure time. Work weeks could fall from 40 hours to maybe 4 hours a week, and everyone has the free time to enjoy their hobbies. Do they have the money, though?
Would a company who just invested capital to displace human effort then keep paying their humans as before? Did the steel industry, as automated processes exploded, keep paying their workers to stand around and watch the assembly lines? Visit a former steel town like Pittsburgh PA and you’ll see the monuments to change in the form of abandoned mills, and this was without AI.
Yes, we’ve heard about companies experimenting with reducing the hours in a work week while continuing pay, but it doesn’t seem to be spreading to companies at large. Yes, we’ve heard about technologies that would make our lives better, ostensibly without changing the workforce. But capital demands return on investment, and so replacing human workers really means creating unemployment in the long run. So where will we find the next vast post-industrial wasteland? Maybe everywhere.
Capital rules right now. Wall Street is way more important than Main Street, but is it safe from AI? We already have software that does algorithmic investment. One of my Wall Street friends quips that his software is selling to and buying from his competitor’s software. Right now, my friend makes a lot of money, as is routine on the Street, but could AI make him redundant, too? Sure.
Back in those dawn-of-computing 1960s, one big financial company found out that if you wanted to train people to program before computer science courses were invented, and you started six hundred qualified people through an exhaustive testing and interview process, you could expect around 20 to start the training and twelve to be commercially successful programmers. One in fifty; two percent. Yes, we might create good jobs with the computer revolution, but not ones the average worker could expect to fill. And based on this company’s experience, the average worker isn’t going to be a programmer whatever training you give them.
Suppose that AI, by nibbling away at little tasks here and there, takes over all the tasks that automation and robotics can support. Suppose that one in fifty can be a part of that revolution, creating the software and the devices. What do the other 49 of our 50, the 98%, do? How do they live? We cannot have a society in which the great majority of people are onlookers. There’s not a sociologist on the planet who would say that such a division would be stable, and in fact we’d have major societal issues long before we got to this end game.
You probably won’t find many on Wall Street or executive suites who believe that AI could really depopulate their workforce significantly, but you’ll find a lot who are happy to see automation in any form reduce the cost of production. That sort of shift, if it’s empowered with the right technology, leads to a future where the toolmakers rule and the tools use themselves.
NASA scientists just released a report that tries to explain why we’ve not found other intelligent life. Their conclusion is that other civilizations didn’t last long enough to be noticed by us. Disease, nuclear war? Maybe. Or maybe they died of a social revolution that spun out of widespread “de-populism” created by AI. We have about eight billion people on earth now, and we have to make sure that what we do to make production more efficient doesn’t make labor valueless, because the 98% probably aren’t going to take that lying down.
I don’t have an answer to all of this, but I think part of the answer has to lie in applying things like AI to be as populizing as the industrial revolution was. I also think part of the answer is to rein in capital a bit. What do you think?