Forget coronavirus: there is an true  global existential  threat  that is   
   almost upon  us   
      
   Robert Henderson   
      
   The attention of the world is currently fixed on coronavirus  but there is   
   another far more serious danger hurtling towards  us  in the shape of    
   Artificial  Intelligence (A.I.) and robotics.   
      
   Both are advancing rapidly. Probably within the lifetime of most people now   
   living – and  quite possibly in the next fifteen  years – there will be   
   general purpose robots (GPRs) capable of doing the vast majority of the work   
   now undertaken by humans.    
   When that happens international free trade and free market economics will   
   become untenable.  The real final crisis of capitalism will be the development   
   of technology so advanced that it makes capitalism in the impossible because   
   machines will make    
   humans redundant across  vast swathes of the economy.   
      
    Economic history shows that technological advance before the advent of   
   digital technology creates new work. It may have very painful consequences for   
   individuals whose livelihood disappears – the British hand-loomweavers of   
   the early industrial    
   revolution are a classic example – but new opportunities for employment have   
   always  as an economy becomes more sophisticated and variegated. The hand-loom   
   weaver found work in the new factories; the redundant western factory worker   
   of today in a call    
   centre. At worst they might only get a MacJob but at least it was a job.   
      
   But if the GPRs can do the MacJobs as well as the more demanding work, then   
   there will not be many new jobs for humans, not even much supervisory work   
   because GPRs will need little supervising, and less and less as  of it they   
   become ever more    
   sophisticated. Hence, this technological advance will be like no other:  GPRs   
   will not only take away existing jobs, they will devour any new work; the   
   easier work first, then the more complex.   
      
   The normal human response to such ideas is not reasonable scepticism, but   
   rejection based on a refusal to accept the reality of change, a rejection   
   expressed with ridicule along the lines of the Victorians’ response to the   
   car:  “It will never    
   replace the horse”. Mention robots and people commonly scoff “Science   
   Fiction” to get rid of the matter without further debate. This type of   
   response is natural enough because human beings, apart from disliking change,   
   do not like to think of    
   themselves as dispensable or redundant. Moreover, incessant propagandising by   
   western elites has made it received opinion of the age that work is becoming   
   ever more demanding and requires an increasingly educated and knowledgeable   
   workforce, something    
   which seems to most humans to make them uniquely capable of doing the jobs of   
   the future and, by implication, this excludes mechanisation (and robots) from   
   the majority of future human employments.   
      
   The hard truth is that most modern work requires less knowledge and skill than   
   was required in the past. A peasant four hundred years ago had to know about   
   his soil, his plants and animals, the seasons, the weather, where natural   
   water was and be able to    
   do a hundred and one practical things such as ploughing, sowing, harvesting,   
   making and repairing of fences and ditches, using tools and turning out cheese   
   and cream and dried meat and vegetables How many jobs today require a tenth of   
   that volume of    
   knowledge? Nor did more demanding work stop at peasants. A 17th century   
   craftsman would have served a long apprenticeship. Jobs which did not require   
   an apprenticeship would have probably required some manual skill. Those who   
   aspired to intellectual    
   employment had to laboriously write and amend their works rather than enjoying   
   the immense convenience of a word processor. That and the cost of writing   
   materials forced them to become precise in a way that virtually no one is   
   today. Perhaps most    
   importantly,  modern division of labour with one person doing a repetitive job   
   was not king. A person making something four centuries ago would probably make   
   the entire item and quite often a variety of items, for example, a 17th   
   century blacksmith would    
   not merely shoe horses but make a wide range of iron goods., GPRs today could   
   take over a great deal of employment in Western economies and much of the   
   industrialised parts of the developing world, especially China, because there   
   are so many simple jobs    
   which would be within the capabilities of very basic GPRs.   
      
   But that is only half of the story. If most jobs are not demanding of much by   
   way of learned skills and even less of intellect, they do need diligence.   
   Human beings are generally more than a little reluctant to put themselves out   
   in work which has no    
   intrinsic interest for them or which is not very highly paid. So what will an   
   employer do when he can employ a robot instead? He will go and gets himself   
   some GPRs which will not get awkward, do what they are told, keep working all   
   the time without being    
   watched, does not make regular mistakes and requires no wages or social   
   security taxes or holidays or sick leave. And it will not be able to sue you   
   for being a bad employer.   
      
   In the beginning at least there will still be a sizeable chunk of jobs which   
   GPRs will not be able to do. These will be the jobs which cannot be reduced to   
   quantifiable tasks; jobs which cannot be done by following an algorithm; jobs   
   which require    
   judgement and jobs which require motivation to achieve a complex end which is   
   not obvious from the units of means which are required to achieve it.  But   
   that work is  only a minority of jobs, probably a small minority, perhaps 20%   
   of the total. If the    
   earliest GPRs could only undertake fifty per cent of the jobs which humans do   
   that would be catastrophic. Human beings will not be able to kid themselves   
   for long that everything is going to be all right.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)