Final Class and Final Post

I was, to be blunt, frustrated and bored with today’s final session of Computers and Society. It felt like the class was discussing an endless chain of nothings over and over again. Many of the ideas presented about AI and the problem of The Second Machine Age felt, well, half-hearted. One, however, really made an impression on me, that idea being wage for automatons.

I think the idea of a wage for automatons is absolutely dastardly. The idea is simple: for every job replaced by an artificial intelligence, companies must pay some sort of tax, which would go into a pool and then be redistributed as base income. Future citizens of America could get paid by corporations to be replaced by robots. This would (hopefully) solve the problem of paying for base income and encourage corporations to employ real workers. 

It’s clever, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I’m not sure why. When the idea was first presented in class, I had visions of 1950’s-era caricatures of communists dance through their head, wringing their hands and smiling evilly against red and yellow backdrops as they plot the downfall of America. This could just be a knee-jerk reaction against socialism, or it could be my mind telling me that the math doesn’t make sense.

The math doesn’t make sense because all resources are finite. All of them. Eventually we will run out of everything – space to grow food, space for people to live in, clean water, fresh air, fossil fuels. It may take billions of years, but even the sun will eventually wither and die, and the Earth with it. If some other resource depends on a finite resource to work, then it is also finite. (This is why the Internet is inherently not an infinite resource, even though it appears to be at first.) This means, of course, that at some point humanity will reach its maximum population. While I am no economist, it seems as if a guaranteed income would eventually exhaust the finite resources of a country like the United States, sooner rather than later. If people supported entirely by base income had children, who also lived by base income, and their children had children, and their children… The profitability of US corporations would have to rise parallel with the growing population, presumably infinitely, or the system would crash and burn. It seems more likely and reasonable that the second option would occur. While humanity stays on Earth, there cannot be infinite growth.

Or maybe it doesn’t make sense. While resources are definitely, absolutely finite, human ingenuity doesn’t seem to be. There is no reason we could not find ways to squeeze more and more out of our finite set of resources, ad infinitum. Perhaps someone, or more likely a series of someones, will create a set of technologies that will allow us to farm or even colonize the ocean. Perhaps some sort of vertical farming technology will allow for, for all practical purposes, infinite amounts of food. At this point, the old capitalist notions of jobs and money will be obsoleted and the debate over AI robbing people with jobs will seem very silly, because there will be no more ‘jobs’.

This is the problem with fantasizing about AI: once we are willing to accept one bit of fantasy as a potential reality, there are infinitely many more potential fantasies that could be potential realities, which all stack onto of each other into a twisted, modern Tower of Babel, spiraling wildly into the realm of unsubstantiated nonsense. I felt like our class tried to climb that tower today.