It’s robots everywhere at the minute. There have been a couple of programmes on the singularity, and the chances that an artificial intelligence might end up disassembling humanity in its quest, not for autonomy, but rather because we stand in the way of the production of whatever it has been set to maximise (always paper clips in the examples, for some reason).
But there was also an interesting piece in the London Review of Books by John Lanchester, and a BBC Radio Four programme, on concerns a little less science fiction – what happens when automation & robots take over all our jobs. I’ve previously noticed that Lanchester has an interesting, somewhat left wing, take on topics like this, and he expressed the vague optimism that it might drive a move to a post capitalist world in which the capital (i.e. the robots) becomes communally owned, and everyone can focus on personal self fulfillment and the like. We can but hope, because the other visions range from the dismal to fairly shallow seeming economic orthodoxy. But there are a couple of things that got missed I think by Lanchester. Firstly, there doesn’t seem to be much of an international dimension – what happens to the third world? These scenarios seem to have a firmly western first world perspective, and I can’t really understand what happens to the rest of the world, a) where most of our factories are, and b) that are heavily reliant on western demand. The other thing is that I think quite a bit of this has already happened – David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit jobs’ phenomenon – the idea that rather than taking to leisure time, we just invent crappy meaningless tasks to justify our middle class incomes.
Anyway, here’s hoping that if and when it happens, the outcome is closer to Lanchester’s post-capitalist utopia, and further from the rapidly accelerating race to the bottom, marxist alienation, or the annihilation of the human race. *nervous grin*
Fireflies 