Artificial Malevolence
Freedom Dead-end
“Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government, etc, exist for except that people may be fed, warmed and safe, in their own homes? The homemaker’s job is one for which all others exist.” - C.S. Lewis
Artificial Intelligence (AI).
It’s a white-hot topic. Especially in and around schools. Teachers are using it to plan lessons, mark hand-written essays, detecting it to thwart tech-savvy cheats and even making student-specific, tailormade podcasts.
In the pedagogical brains trust of schools’ management, more sophisticated questions are contemplated; how do we integrate AI into the curriculum, how do we teach students to best use it?
Arguably, a redundant question, as I suspect we are going to be experiencing quite a different form of AI in 5+ years’ time. What skills should we be teaching our children? How can we know?
It was from one of these conversations with a friendly, fellow parent that I was prompted to read The Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford – Business Book of the Year (snigger) as sponsored by the FT and McKinsey & Co (guffaw) 2015. We had been talking how it should now be possible to feed every legal case in the written history of legal cases, along with the corresponding judgments, for-and-against justifications, legal arguments and cited case law into an AI verdict-generator. On this basis, a prospective client could simply fill in a questionnaire and obtain a highly accurate reading of the likelihood of winning their legal action…and the cost-benefit ratio. How many would pursue a 10% chance? 20%, 30%...even 60%?
Maybe this algorithm has not yet been implemented (/ made available) purely because entrenched interests don’t wish for the concomitant nose-dive in lucrative, if unnecessary, work.
Just one example of myriad of how AI technology might change the labour market we live in…very, very soon.
Well, at least once the incumbent, fusty vested interests shuffle off into retirement.
We could not help but extend this logic to nearly all skilled and unskilled labour. Machine robots have already decimated the reliance on human, physical labour on factory production lines, in postal services, ports, warehouses, railways and, of course, McDonalds.
Considering how modern-day professionals have essentially been trained by rote to defer decision-making to academically sanctioned decision-trees (“if this…then that”), how can those procedural roles of General Practitioner, accountant, asset manager, engineer, estate agent, etc continue to justify their existence?
But then, why would the elimination of those jobs be a bad thing. Were these people born unto this Earth with the sole ability to account, manage a stock portfolio or sell houses?
In New York in the late 19th Century approximately 150,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of manure – daily. Sewerage systems and cars caused the obliteration of thousands of shit-shovelling jobs. Many ended up cleaning up refuse or in the construction business. Jobs that they likely preferred.
Do our jobs define who we are?
Or does who we are define what we do with our lives?
The book is in essence a modern-day Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich) doomily leaning on excruciatingly dehumanising Keynesian dogma to extol the virtue of the Universal Basic Income (UBI). This chilling, dystopic sophistry will likely be lauded by the likes of the Trilateral Commission and the Club of Rome.
And the IMF, World Bank, WEF, UN, WHO…and increasingly our evermore technocratic governments across the West.
UBI is something we need to know and think about as more than likely it will creep into noxious election manifestos as the next free-money, throwaway bribe to elicit votes. Potentially returning US Democrat candidate, Andrew Yang, has previously made substantial electioneering headway very naughtily (if exasperatingly transparently) relabelling UBI a “Freedom Dividend”.
It’s something which will cause those with a heavily authoritarian bent to break into raptures. The elitest bliss of having the lower cohorts of the proletariat wholly reliant on the state. Combine that with Central Bank Digital Currencies and Digital ID and the commoner cattle would be fully under managed decline - most probably population decline, to Ehrlich’s ideological delight.
The book cannot help itself but treat neo-Keynesian voodoo as a priori facts.
Somehow, the machines will simply make stuff for consumers other than the UBI proles. The implication is that the peasants will thereon after be worthless at either creating value for those consumers or as consumers themselves. UBI implies that the State values its recipients’ time at zero.
Time being their life. Their lives as worthless.
The point that is missed is the one made by C.S. Lewis in the above quote. One that is being increasingly overlooked in a society where people are breathlessly scrambling after the next dollar: fake money to pay for the all the stuff they think they need, so that they forget to have a think about what they genuinely need.
Mr Ford talks about the economy as if he is sat behind a control panel with a display of knobs, dials and levers with which he and his co-intellectuals can guide the economy: central planning by the geniuses that gave us 98% currency debasement, the GFC, COVID, global wars and destruction-driven GDP growth. Credentialled masterminds that can dial up and down incentives, nudges, subsidies, stealth taxes, wealth taxes, penalties, fines, regulations, information and propaganda to help us, the Great Unwashed, behave in a manner that maintains their vision of the socio-economy on an even keel.
That being a gradual phasing out of the useless eaters?
A technocratic, some might say reductive way to view the world.
How do we keep all these pointless feeders sated, if the only thing they can add to this world is their silly manual and university-thinky labour which is no longer of any use?
This stance completely misses some fundamental truths about human existence. As did Keynes (but then he got up to some pretty inhuman stuff…allegedly).
On the plus side, maybe neo-Keynesian economics will be laid evermore bare as the pseudo-science propaganda that it evidently is by the fact that none of these predictions will manifest.
As they haven’t yet in the 10 years since the book was published.
Moore’s Law*, which the book relies upon as a fundamental plank of the thesis, is generally agreed to no longer apply (begging the question as to why a mistruth was elevated to a “Law” in the first place).
The fact of the matter is that all value is subjective and calculated by each individual.
What brings you happiness is unlikely to bring me happiness. And that evaluation is constantly changing for each of us for our short term goals (yum, dark chocolate), medium term goals (make it to an Ashes test match) to long term goals (smile and feel loved on my deathbed).
It is the variation between individuals’ evaluations that is the basis, the prerequisite, for all economic activity.
If we all had the same ideas, values, capabilities, assets, etc then there would be no exchange. In that respect, it is our differences, yes inequality, that drives progress.
None of us are the same.
As a rule of thumb, individuals will value goods and services with ordinal priorities broadly aligning with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Not a lot of individuals are going to buy a firework in favour of food for the family, if doing so would mean that they would go hungry.
Much like Keynesians have come to believe that consumption is a forerunner to production, Mr Ford and his entrenched establishment take the view that the plebs are there to serve the labour market, rather than the labour market being there to serve them.
In short, my optimistic (quixotic) vision sees AI recalibrating this modern-day muddled mindset. A future in which our drifting society takes stock to deeply ponder what really matters.
In an ultra-robotocised world, the marginal cost of food, shelter and clothing - basic human needs - should tend to zero.
Oxygen is a basic human need but sufficiently abundant to be free. That doesn’t stop us focussing on the next rung on the ladder.
So, when our AI future ensures that our daily essentials of food, clothing and shelter are met, the human instinct will be to seek the next priority: safety and security.
Surely, that cannot be what this push for UBI is about. A strategic sleight of hand by the state to make the masses dependent on government handouts, thus distracting them from addressing the lack of safety and security wrought by its amoral forever wars?
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Thought experiment: surely, if we believe in AI’s knowledge-processing capability, we should delegate to it our decision-making? Given that it has access to all the vast body of historic knowledge and written experience (who did what, when with what results) its emotion-free algorithms should logically be better placed to make career, partner and lifestyle decisions than any of us.
If that was the case, what would you ask AI to solve for? Longevity? Monetary wealth? Healthy family? Status?...happiness?!
For you alone? Your family? Community?...the Greater Good?!
What about trade-offs?
What if happiness is not achievable without overcoming personal challenges…some suffering…specific to your circumstances? Making one’s own mistakes? What’s the optimal level of suffering to achieve the maximum amount of lifetime happiness?
If a nebulous concept such as happiness enters the equation to any meaningful degree, then do we not plunge straight back into the domain of the human individual…and some of the most profound philosophical questions with which our consciousness has wrestled since becoming self-aware?
Per the Austrian School of Economics’ great insight, value is subjective. Only the individual is capable of making the socioeconomic valuation of what is best for them.
This is what it means to be human. To lead a meaningful life. To be able to take autonomous human action.
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The general populace has had econometric measurements mantra-ed into their heads. GDP, wage growth, per capita income, unemployment rates, CPI, etc. Statistical witchcraft. We exist in an economic paradigm where it is a plus for a factory in China to produce of pile of plastic tatt, sell it to the West and for it to be thrown into landfill a day later.
More pertinently, commandeering labour, land and capital to produce ruinously costly weapons of mass destruction to obliterate existing capital elsewhere is GDP positive. Massively so. Eventually, even for the country on the wrong side of those deathly explosives (as it rebuilds).
THAT is what stands for GDP growth in 2025.
Whereas reading to your child, making a stranger laugh, visiting the oldies’ home or, more transactionally, mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for some home laid eggs does not. That creation of real value does not show up in the official figures.
We need to get back to understanding real economics. Value is adjudicated and created by YOU, the individual.
The USD, JPY, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD** measurements by which we have been trained to price goods and services in the market used to serve as a decent proxy - for when those goods and services in fact traded on something akin to a free market.
Vested interests, industrial lobbying, subsidies, gargantuan tax overreach…essentially, unprecedented government intervention has led to a vilely distorted market that is dominated by those leveraging political influence versus those producing genuine, tangible value.
There is little doubt that AI will be phenomenally - epoch definingly - disruptive.
But maybe, its most destructive aspect will be to force us to reassess. Think. Ponder what is genuinely important to us and what actions we want to take in order to leave a meaningful legacy…
Value created in each other’s hearts and minds, rather than fiat-denominated trash traded on corrupted markets.
Or…
…could you be tempted to pick up your first Freedom Dividend and treat yourself to just one week of fast food and online gaming…just a week, before you get back to living your best life…
UBI anaesthetises the masses. It negates purpose.
The true malevolence of AI will more likely manifest in its perpetuation of war as a means of “economic growth”.
“War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.” - Ron Paul
* Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years with a minimal increase in cost. Roughly speaking, the doubling of processing power every two years.
** I am still thinking through how this is meant to work. If you imagine a world of UBI, then the masses would (in the simplest form) be issued with monetary tokens with which to buy food, clothing and shelter. But money is supposed to capture value created at a point in time. As the UBI-recipients are outside of the productive, money-generating economy, they are receiving vouchers that they are incapable of generating themselves, nor for investing in themselves. Yet what the elites presumably value most is land. The factors of production are land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship (economic creativity and risk-taking). If labour and entrepreneurship can be delegated to AI-bots and the vast majority of capital has already been extracted from the masses through taxes, debt and inflation then we are left with land. Land includes the natural resources that are crucial for constructing (rare earth minerals and metals) and powering (oil, gas, coal, uranium, thorium) the AI-bots. So, what we would be really looking at is a bifurcated monetary and corresponding social system. Pleb-tokens for the masses and commodity- or land-backed money for the elites. Money would take on a very different meaning.
Brilliant!