Month: September 2020

There’s a widely-held belief that, however advanced machines get, humans will always have a monopoly on work requiring creativity, artistry, and emotional interaction. After all, robots and computer programs are only capable of doing rote, mechanical tasks, and only “think” in very brittle ways that are fundamentally different from how our minds work. In fact, the prospect of automating all drudge work, and even high-level analytical work, is a desirable scenario to many people, as it would allow us to focus ourselves on those realms of thought and endeavor that are both uniquely human and the most deeply gratifying. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have machines take care of your essential needs for free while you spent your days indulging in your passions and hobbies, honing your skills to that master level you’ve always known you were capable of if only you had the time to practice? Surely, unless we blow ourselves up, technology will ultimately make such a lifestyle possible, right? A glorious “end of history.” 

Well, I doubt it will happen, and if it happens, it won’t last. 

First, there’s no reason to assume machines won’t someday be more creative, artistic, and “emotional” (even if those emotions are just outwardly simulated and not inwardly experienced) than humans. If writing and performing a song that moves people to tears is ultimately just the product of specific patterns of human brain activity, then there’s no barrier to computers simulating the same process, and making the songs faster, cheaper and maybe better than the best humans can. And as profound and as idiosyncratically “human” as they may seem, our emotions are also the mere products of brain activity, meaning machines could simulate them, too. In fact, machines might be better-suited to jobs requiring an emotional touch than humans since they could be programmed to have the optimal personality profiles for the task. Imagine a therapist who was preternaturally calm, reassuring, and unable to take offense to anything you said.

Second, there’s the hard economic reality of supply and demand. If tomorrow machines liberated humans from drudge work, and the government provided everyone with free health care and a basic income, leaving us free to pursue our passions full-time without risk, finding ways to stand out would actually become harder. You would get the chance to finally focus on writing that book, open that indie coffee shop, or do artistic photography, but so would hundreds of millions of other people. The competition would be incredibly fierce, the market for whatever zany good or service you have a passion for selling would be glutted, and the same ultra-talented, sickeningly ambitious, status-seeking people who succeed today would rise to the top of the pack in the New World Order as well. And of course dumb luck would continue to be a major factor (e.g. – the highest-paid actors in Hollywood mostly aren’t the best actors in the world; they’re above-average actors who got lucky breaks or were leapfrogged to the top because they knew an important boss in the industry).

Social media’s limited headway in “leveling the playing field” by enabling anyone to distribute their creative content and reap success and fame is instructive. The rise of  video sharing platforms has gone a long way to decentralizing entertainment content creation and consumption and to weakening the traditional titans of media, but it hasn’t allowed every schmoe who tries to make a living off of YouTube ad revenues to succeed. The vast majority haven’t and won’t thanks to the implacable Law of Supply and Demand. The market for entertaining videos is oversaturated with Supply, Demand is much less flexible since there are only so many humans in the world with so much free time each day to watch videos, and as a result, among the firms providing Supply, the income/popularity spread conforms to the 100-year-old Pareto Distribution.

The past 15 years have shown that, even as information technology has advanced, the fundamental forces that control how markets work have not. I see no reason why this should change in the future, which makes me deeply skeptical of the theory that technological unemployment won’t be a bad thing because it will free up humans to PROFITABLY pursue the arts or other creative endeavors. In such a scenario, the market for “artsy” or “creative” stuff would be glutted by the wave of people entering it, and there wouldn’t be enough wages to go around.

If you want to see direct evidence of this phenomenon, go to a local arts and crafts festival, think about how extraordinarily skilled some of the artisans are (even if just in some narrow realm, like making custom ceramic coffee mugs), and then think about how many of them seem like they’re rich, or even appear to be doing enough sales volume to produce minimum wage income. Now, imagine what it would be like if there were ten times as many people selling arts and crafts, meaning the competition was ten times as intense. Profit margins would only shrink.

To be clear, I think a post-scarcity future where machines did most of the work and where humans were free to do what they wanted would be better overall for most people than today’s capitalist rat-race world. However, I think people overestimate how satisfying and stable it would be. Many people would find it shattering if, after being finally unshackled from their rote jobs and allowed to delve full-time into their passions, they turned out to be not that good at it, and no one wanted to buy their artsy, custom-made coffee mugs or their books of poetry. Maybe it’s better for one’s ego to have an unrealized fantasy than to have a shot at it and fail. And even if you proved excellent in the field of work you were passionate about, the odds are you still wouldn’t be among the best, consigning you to a lifetime of middling success, and how would that be much different from an attainable life you could have today?

And of course, if machines gain the ability to do the creative/artsy/emotional stuff, it’s the coup de grace. Relatedly, the knowledge that a machine somewhere out there is always better than you, irrespective of what task you try to do or what personal attribute you have, will only undermine our sense of individual and collective competence and importance. 

I think the freedom to do what we want with all of our time will produce widespread boredom, aimlessness, and antisocial behavior to relieve those feelings. It’s no coincidence that the violent street protests the U.S. had this year happened when colleges were closed for the summer and many people were out of work thanks to the pandemic-triggered economic crash. Many of these people were unoccupied and had nothing better to do. (Interestingly, the U.S. also instituted a “temporary UBI” this year, so 2020 might have given us a glimpse into the future in more ways than one.) 

Additionally, if we were free to do what we wanted, a disturbingly large fraction of the population would reveal itself to have no productive passions or hobbies, and would instead indulge in full-time hedonistic behavior. These people would be fundamentally different from the artsy and creative types I mentioned earlier. However skilled or deluded they were, those guys were still producers who strove to make content and provide services. The future hedonists will be pure consumers.

To the list of hedonistic classics like drug abuse and reckless sports, we can add more sophisticated distractions that will exist thanks to the advanced technology that we’ll have by the time the post-scarcity UBI world arises, like unending sex with beautiful androids or living in virtual reality video games that seem totally real. I won’t deny that such a life would be fun most of the time, and that it would beat being a working stiff, but I also think it would be ultimately unsatisfying for most people.  

My big point is that even a post-scarcity UBI world where machines did the hard work wouldn’t be a utopia. In fact, I think it would fall farther short of it than its futurist acolytes realize. Thanks to our very nature–including our limits–humans can’t create a perfectly satisfying and happy world with any level of technology. Better technology and changes to the socioeconomic system could certainly make the world objectively better than it is now, just as we’re objectively better-off than we were in the Dark Ages, but conditions will never approach a state of perfection. Ultimately, pursuing higher levels of happiness and satisfaction will require us to radically re-engineer ourselves as a species, but that’s for another blog entry…

Links:

1. “Creative Adversarial Networks” make paintings that look like those of professional human painters: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-hard-painting-made-computer-human
2. “Utopia” is Greek for “no place” in acknowledgement of the fact that it can’t exist: http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/utopia.html