The Life of Leisure
Of course having intelligent robots or cyborgs around will cause problems even if they obey our every command. Businesses will no doubt notice that an artificial person will not need to be paid, will not get tired and will not want to go home at 5:00PM sharp, they will also not be so concerned about workplace accidents or be inclined to form unions. They will just do what their boss tells them to do. Costs are lowered significantly and they will perform better than any human.
Using robotic workers will lead to what was once called the "life of leisure" whereby we become free from the confines and need to work.
Unfortunately this is also known as mass unemployment. In this case however it gets worse, it will result in Hyper Unemployment. Since humans will become unnecessary for most work unemployment will permanently soar to unprecedented levels. To make things worse the businesses that use robotic workers will run out of customers so even they will become unemployed. A total success for Capitalism will also be a total failure.
The effect on human civilisation of intelligent machines could be catastrophic. Poverty levels and crime will soar, abject poverty leads to desperation and this in turn leads to hatred, in desperate times people become open to listening to extremist opinions which would normally be shunned. This can be devastating, you need only look to history to see what happens when feeding on hatred and desperation, extremists get into power.
The economic desperation scenario is explored in the Animatrix and it is the background which ultimately leads to humans declaring war on the machines (not the other way around).
The Hyper Unemployment problem could have a solution in the form of an interesting mix of Socialism and Capitalism. Tax businesses at a very high rate and use this to pay the population (Socialism). Then, the population could use their pay to purchase products from those businesses (Capitalism). The end result is an economy which can remain afloat even with nearly 100% unemployment. It could be pretty ironic turn of events if in order for the world economy to survive that Capitalism will need the help of Socialism and Socialism the help of Capitalism.
Many countries already do things along the same lines as this (generally pouring money into large construction schemes to boost the economy) so it isn't as weird as it sounds. It could however be something of a bitter pill to swallow for the countries who's economic systems are more to the left or right of the political spectrum.
Such a system will have all sorts of weird side effects though, people by their very nature will always try and out do one another, how can a person earn a better wage when there are no jobs? When everything becomes produced by cheap labour what happens to the idea of value? Unique and old things will increase in value as they will be the only things which can't be made cheaper. Art will pay a more important part in society as human creativity is one thing robots will have a hard time copying.
Once we've fixed the economy the problem then becomes one of chronic boredom. Even if we can afford to live, replace all our jobs and we are going to need something to do. Perhaps the Matrix will get built after all and we'll plug ourselves in simply for something to do.
Whatever way we look at it the coming of strong Artificial Intelligence is going to have massive effects on human society, unfortunately not all of these are pleasant.
The idea of Artificial Intelligence portrayed in Science Fiction is different from the one I have described here. The machines I have described here do not have emotions, they are not conscious of themselves, they are still just machines.
Will they become conscious? Will they have emotions?
In the final part of this series I shall go into these questions. I also ask what happens if they take their knowledge and apply it to us...
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References
[1] The C-1 re-configurable computer.
http://c64upgra.de/c-one/
[2] Evolutionary (or Genetic) Programming.
http://www.genetic-programming.org/
[3] Evolutionary software is just as good as us.
http://www.genetic-programming.com/humancompetitive.html
[4] Black and White features advanced AI.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1237848.stm
[5] I take a somewhat liberal meaning from religious text and thus I have no difficulty believing in both Evolution and God. This view also does not disagree with science since it simply has nothing to say about God (there is no evidence either way so therefore no conclusion).
Copyright (c) Nicholas Blachford March 2004
Disclaimer:
This series is about the future and as such is nothing more than informed speculation on my part. I suggest future possibilities and actions which companies may take but this does not mean that they will take them or are even considering them.
- "Future of computing, Page 1/4"
- "Future of computing, Page 2/4"
- "Future of computing, Page 3/4"
- "Future of computing, Page 4/4"
