GNXP alum Joel Grus,the guy who suggested “Gene Expression” as the name for the blog and slapped together the logo above, has an interesting post titled “Robotic Nation” over at the blog he abandoned us for (to be fair, version 2.0 of his old blog) He asks the question, when the left side of the Bell Curve is made redundant by robots, what will they do [1]? And how will the plutocracy delude them with dreams of a splendiferous future when even their paltry analytical skills can deduce the math and intuit the implications?
As a libertarian I still prefer free trade, free exchange of ideas, blah, blah, blah…. But let me step back from my axioms for a milli-moment and embed myself in the reality of this world that might be less pleasant, for lack of a better word, more Derbyshirean, than I like to be. Is Jo-Schmo who lacks initiative beyond reaching for his next can of beer going to start his own company when he’s down-sized? Go back to college when he couldn’t get trigonometry back in 12th grade? I have stated frankly that there are cultures, whole nations, that are poorly suited to the modern world. If history is a path with the post-industrial world as the inevitable destination, some peoples are much further behind than others, but the reality of the situation is that the destination has raced back to meet the laggards. Well, there are also individuals poorly suited to the modern world, and it seems quitely like that the percentage of these people is increasing as modernity marches on. The reductio ad absurdum is the arrival of true A.I. as a higher actualization of the concept of sapient beings, something envisioned positively by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and less glowingly by his colleague Frank Herbert.
And yet in early 21st century America, we have already witnessed the reemergence of “organic robots” a century after the Progressive Era banished them by fiat of the law, they are called “undocumented workers,” and they do the dirty & dangerous jobs for a fraction of the cost of real workers. Economist George Borjas has done research on the erosion of wages & employment opportunities that lower income Americans have had to deal with because of the arrival of cheap labor in the form of organic robots. Now, the robotic maw is chewing its way up the occupational food chain. Today, IT is facilitating the export of IT overseas, to the horror & distress of the IT hordes (yes, including me).
Of course, the standard response is that human initiative is all that is lagging in such situations, and my friend godless has asserted that out-of-work scientists should start their own companies. There is something to this, after all, many out-of-work white collar folk have gotten used to cushy make-work jobs where they sign-off on the sweat & labor of cheaper & younger co-workers. Let’s not shed too many tears. But in the end, I wonder if the last employed workers, le creme de le creme, will be reporting to an A.I. CEO and supervising robotic foremen, a thin layer of lubricating biochemistry between electon clouds & metals in motion? (yes, far more plausible that the A.I. will control the robots directly, but let a man have his dreams!)
Well, there is another alternative, rather than a distinct organic layer between inorganic entities, cybernetics might swallow a portion of the human race into a chimeric super-organism. This portion might be genetically engineered so that the term “human” has to be used in the context of lineal descent rather than morphological qualities. In such a scenario, the question of organic vs. inorganic is moot, and our limited conception of the universe will be transformed in such a fashion that I am likely a fish blowing bubbles at the bottom of a pond from the perspective of the post-human consciousness.
[1] An observation. Humanoid robots were supposed to be here in 1980. 1990. 2000. And so forth. In contrast, though we don’t have “true A.I.,” computers have far more power and flexibility than many futurists predicted, each iteration of the Turing Test being overcome by a new and more powerful incarnation of the machine mind.
Godless comments:
Big problems with this article:
1) It assumes that robotics technology is going to leap ahead of cybernetics/drugs/genetic engineering, all of which will be able to boost the left-hand side of the curve to do creative work. If we’re talking future technology advanced enough to produce autonomous robots with human-like vision processing, we’re talking germline engineering, artificial chromosomes, bionic eyes, drugs better at warding off sleep than caffeine and more effective at boosting IQ than wannabes like gingko…the works. There won’t be a left-hand side of the bell curve around at that point in time.
2) It ignores the fact that EVERYTHING will become ultra cheap through roboticization (costing essentially power + spare parts) and nanotechnology, and even a little bit of human work will provide for quite a lot of food/entertainment/etc.
3) It ignores the fact that previous waves of automatization have not
yet eliminated unskilled labor. Remember, this is what Marx bitched about too, 150 years ago. All kinds of exciting new professions will open up for the unskilled: experimental test subject, human drug factory, etcetera ;)…anything that leverages their biological substrate.
Of these objections, I think #1 is the most fatal for Marshall’s scenario. There’s no way we will make robots smarter without also gaining the ability to make humans smarter.
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