What I think the future will be
I was bored yesterday and wrote a little summary of my thoughts for the future. This was partially inspired by the upcoming Singapore General Election taking place tomorrow and a certain online conservation I had with someone. After I finished writing it, I realized that it bears some similarities to the Dune timeline, so perhaps I was just agreeing with Frank Herbert.
In a future when all jobs of lower complexity than astrophysicists have been replaced by robots, conglomerates that own robots and their patents will reap the benefit of virtually all economic activities on the planet, while regular people can offer no value to the system. A tiny number of humans hold the few high-complexity jobs needed and are genetically superior in those roles due to generations of selection.
The masses soon realize that they have been made obsolete. A neo-Marxist revolution sweeps across the planet and great wars are fought, but the many cannot defeat the few. The corporations have centuries of technological advantage in their favour and their self-replicating machines swiftly put an end to the insurrections. The rebels are disarmed and ejected from the system.
With its obsolescence made official, most of humanity slowly regresses to pre-industrial subsistence-level economies. Civilization for most returns to small isolated communities. Even basic technology like fossil fuels and computers disappear with time because the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources is monopolized by the corporations whose robotic armies forcefully defend their subjectless fiefdoms.
The corporations wall themselves off in massive robotized vertical cities and mostly ignore the rest of humanity, occasionally sending expeditions into the wild to harvest feral human specimens for body parts and genetic material or clearing land to make room for industrial expansion.
Eventually, the corporate overlords evolve into a symbiotic relationship with machines and cease to be fully organic, gaining in the process physiological traits suitable for deep space voyages that cannot be duplicated organically. The evolved humanity leaves Earth after its crust has been almost completely emptied of useful compounds and before it is consumed by a dying sun. To the stars!
In the alternate timeline, Earth takes a hit from a giant meteor and humanity goes extinct in 2012.
I suppose the real alternative scenario is some kind of socialist paradise where the combined productivity of machines is more than sufficient to be distributed evenly across a humanity and free it from its eternal struggle to earn a living to either drown in hedonistic pleasures or pursue knowledge and science.
And I suppose this is more likely to happen if advancements and breakthroughs in technology are made accessible to everyone rapidly enough that no single sub-community has enough time to build a giant army of self-replicating killer robots before the rest have at least learnt how to build regular killer robots. Perhaps this is the real reason why patent terms should be as short as possible.
Just think about it. One day, a corporation similar to Isaac Asimov’s U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. will be making tons of robots and conducting massive research into robotics and A.I. Everyone will think that robots are super awesome, so whenever Robotics Inc. sues some small-time robotics lab for infringing one of its ten trillion patents, people will just go “oh Sony Robots Inc., you so crazy” and return to enjoying their cup of coffee brewed by their robot butler while posting silly crap like this on Facetablet (because the concept of books no longer exist of course).
Eventually Robotics Inc. decides that it is no longer in its economic interest to have customers when they reach the tipping point where they can just make robots to create wealth passively. And before you know it, everyone else has been made obsolete.
Okay, so the real future will probably be somewhat different. But putting aside the details, let’s consider the big picture and the natural of power dynamics in human societies.
Kings and emperors derived their power from the people. People were stupider and more ignorant in the past, so this mandate was easy to get through coercion. Eventually, this transformed into a more democratic and equal relationship and we now have the idea of a “social contract” between the government and its people. But still, the point is that people living at the top of social hierarchies are rich and comfortable only because people below them are economically productive. Smart kings, presidents, CEOs and even dictators all recognize this fact and therefore seek to retain the loyalty and productivity of their subjects, citizens and workers through either incentives or threats.
But technology changes this relationship. Every worker replaced by a robot is one whose opinions and needs no longer matter to the person at the top. Today a person can operate a crane to do what once required dozens of people to perform. With an army of robots, it is not inconceivable for a single person or corporation to someday run an entire economy. Capitalism kind of breaks down in that system, because that corporation will no longer need consumers. Money and wealth are ultimately just means to secure an end in an economy of many productive parties, but this hypothetical corporation is basically omnipotent and needs nothing from others.
Sure, we are far from this scenario as long as artificial intelligence remains as crappy as it is today. But consider the effects of globalization: we have increasing rich-poor divides because people higher up in the economic hierarchy benefit greatly from moving low-skill jobs to the third world while people at the lower end are mostly screwed. Think third-world sweat shops are unfair competition? Just imagine what will happen when we have self-replicating, self-maintaining robot workers.
Everyone needs a college degree to get a job now. When the economy becomes fully automated, every remaining job will require at least a PhD. There certainly won’t be enough of such positions to go around for 10 billion people unless we expand massively into space.
Actually this is sounding more and more like the fundamental ideas behind Marxism, but with robots. Oh shit.
Sometimes I think crazy. I think I’m probably missing some key argument. The future can’t be that bleak.
May 7th, 2011 at 3:10 am
Cool writing bro.
My honest opinion is that you’re like 50 years too late. Your vision of the future is already obsolete.
If there’s one thing that speaks to me that the future will never going to be like that, it would be the way the US GNP/GDP breaks down by industry sector: service and high tech are the two largest sectors. This necessarily mean that humans will forever be in the economic loop, and economics, for the foreseeable future, be the ultimate measure of power in the world. More importantly, I think the US economy is likely the kind of economy that today’s developing worlds are morphing into, should they phase out the kind of transition that some first-world countries are experiencing (see: Japan’s economy).
Because it’s going to be a extremely long while until computers are smart enough to replace their inventors at inventing things, and in order to replace humans in service, it requires just as big of a power shift as any communist revolution.
May 7th, 2011 at 4:10 am
It depends. Most of the high-tech sectors receive government funding and not private forays into the unknown because it’s just not that reliable for an individual millionaire to spend his fortune on developing something that could take decades to become economically viable. Due to the government being the source of this funding and the ultimate contractor/possessor of the technology, if such luxuries and conveniences as robotic butlers or janitors or crane operators were made viable, it would receive HUGE opposition from low-wage labor. The resulting displacement in human resources would also lead to a decrease in consumerism and a huge burden on social securities or relief/aid tax payer money. Robots also do not pay taxes or contribute to society in a multifaceted way and would definitely be opposed by the government and politicians who would be losing their voters, paychecks, and federal budget. Look at Germany. West Germany’s economy nearly crippled from taking on the economic burden of Easy Germany. That’s why South Korea can’t easily merge with North Korea either; where’s it going to get all the jobs and money to develop North Korea?
However, if there emerged a super conglomerate of corporations, contractors, sub-contractors, etc. (Samsung merging with Disney?) with the resources to practically create its own nation, then perhaps a dystopic robot-oriented world might be feasible. Before it gets overtaken by an actual nation’s established military force before it has the time to consolidate its means of defense. Also, EMPs by firing atmospheric nuclear weaponry would own all robots.
I have more to say, but I don’t think the complexity and impact of every single detail can be completely outlined in a single and novice comment by a padawan such as I.
May 7th, 2011 at 7:58 am
instead of trolling I’m going to actually make a constructive comment~
Human space colonization probably will become our only option. It’s not like we are all going to become otakus and cause our nation to have a declining birth rate *cough* japan *cough*. The only option would be to move to other planets such as mars. Moving to Mars to live is a whole problem of its own; however, this can stave off the problem long enough for people to realize that instead of
asking whether or not we’ll run out of fossile fuel
we’ll be asking whether we can explore and find planets fast enough.
I think that the nations all across the world will realize that the only way to stop mass extinction from new technology will be to hussle to get a space colonization project going. The borders will dissapiate and the Earth Federation will form. Massive exploration all across the world and will occur. Hopefully, nuclear fusion reactors have been made at this point. Even better would be for reverse engineering the brain to take a few hundred more years. Another nice thing would be if your robotic future would occur quite a few decades after we have “infinite energy” and have space colonization down to a T.
May 7th, 2011 at 10:00 am
Ok, I’ll bite.
The average middle-class family in the USA enjoys a standard of living easily comparable to that enjoyed by an aristocrat of yesteryear. How so? Consider that comfortable shelter, heating, running water, entertainment, waste disposal and transport are available to the average family, without them having to do so much beyond spending 8 hours a day essentially supervising this system at a computer. The aristocrat probably had around 5-10 servants to perform these functions, but the modern family has none. There certainly still exists an underclass, a section of the population relegated to doing tasks that cannot yet be automated, but the majority of the labor that used to be performed is now either eliminated or at least greatly reduced in scope by modern technology.
What do we get when we extrapolate this trend going forward, barring some kind of technological Singularity? First, let me put forward that today, the average middle-class person’s contribution to society (2 hrs web surfing, 1 hr lunch, 1 hr tea break, 2 hrs in meetings and 2 hrs analyzing information) does not sum up to what they receive in material benefits from society. The surplus of course comes from technology that was invented by people, like Newton or Marconi, who basically ‘produced’ infinitely more value in their lifetimes than they ever consumed. We, as a race, are basically sitting on more and more ‘wealth’ as time goes on. You touch on this trend a bit in your text above.
However, I question why you assume that in a future where everyone could basically live like a King while barely doing any work whatsoever, that one group would attempt to seize power and monopolize the system to their own ends. True, this is a narrative that we’ve seen played and re-played throughout the ages. But is this current age not one where economic power is at is most dispersed? Certainly, there is a lot of power concentrated in the mega-corporations, but even they do not ‘rule’ their employees like despots from on high. In fact, I would say that now, more than ever, individuals are free to choose what to do with their lives. Again, I must qualify that we are still in transition, and as such there are certainly huge numbers of people to which this does not yet apply, but the onward march of technology has proven to be relentless, surviving the dark ages and more. I feel that it is inevitable that we will eventually settle into a steady state where there are more than enough resources for each person.
May 8th, 2011 at 1:12 am
>I suppose the real alternative scenario is some kind of socialist paradise >where the combined productivity of machines is more than sufficient to be >distributed evenly across a humanity and free it from its eternal struggle >to earn a living to either drown in hedonistic pleasures or pursue >knowledge and science.
This reminds me a lot of the The Culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture).
May 8th, 2011 at 6:02 am
I bet we’re going to be completely off and 30 years from now we’ll remember this post and laugh at our innocence.
May 9th, 2011 at 12:38 pm
omo:
Humans will forever be in the loop as long as machines cannot think. That is true. But the number of humans needed will be completely insignificant compared to current and past economy.
Even if we assume that human intelligence evolves to a point where every individual is capable of holding high-end research or management jobs, there simply aren’t that many jobs to go around.
We will still need engineers, but we don’t need 1 billion of them when schematics, inventions and designs can be distributed digitally and only the best ones put to actual use.
Of course the future is unlikely to follow my scenario due to millions of unaccountable factors. But my general argument is just that in a highly-advanced knowledge economy, the real economic value is produced by a very, very tiny portion of humans along with robots. Therefore, the majority of humanity will not be productive. Going by free-market capitalism, the majority of humans should not be rewarded with the products of the economy.
I think it comes down to whether economies become more socialist through active redistribution, or whether they become more polarized as a small minority earns an increasing larger share of the economy through pure meritocracy. And which one is “better”.
I think an argument can be made for either case.
May 9th, 2011 at 11:34 pm
The mere mention of foreign talent/labour is enough to send many people in 1st world countries running to get a 3rd/4th/nth degree in an attempt to stave off competition, while protesting on the side, so what more an army of robots poised to take over the economy?
I would suppose that reluctance on the part of the middle/lower class would be enough reason to stagger the evolution of robots into fully functioning components of the economy(think Japan and the internet LOL). These people remain the majority and democratic governments cannot put off ignoring their concerns indefinitely. After all, they are most at risk of being displaced by the robots. The resultant social problems will also pose a significant challenge to governments, assuming they don’t decide to leave their people to fend for themselves. (I guess this is where the social contract comes in?)
And due to the delay that all this causes, there will be a huge time window for a lot of other unexpected things to happen. Like WW3, or various corporations deciding to kill each other off in a twisted real-life version of Battle Royale D:
Oh and you spelt conversation wrongly <_<
May 11th, 2011 at 8:21 pm
Ooooh new post
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Begins reading
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A certain online conservation?
On topic, I was just made to “voluntarily” resign from my 6 per hour job because they were overstaffed. Darn.
May 15th, 2011 at 12:44 am
Way too many unaccounted for factors. It’s very difficult to know the social effects of new technologies.
I think that because humans are social creatures, wealth and power will shift more towards actors, performers, and storytellers. Many nerds, including formerly myself, think that manufacturing and research is all-important. But even the people holding the guns, or commanding the robots that hold the guns, need social interaction.
You could say that advanced androids can provide social interaction, or a Matrix-like dream-world could divert the elite while their armies subjugate the planet in reality.
I don’t have an immediate answer to that. Without thinking it through completely, all I can say is I believe peoples’ desire for other people will preserve large chunks of society.