For years I have been in the camp that automation is going to decimate our species in ways we can't even imagine. This is well before Gen-AI entered into the conversation and I could go back to conversations I had in the 90s about it. However, the pushback has always been pretty strong, saying first that "the technology won't be good enough to replace humans" and then that "even if it is, we will go on to other things like we did in past technology revolutions".
Short-sightedness is the condition of the masses.
Even a decade or so ago when the conversation of self-driving cars came about and I would mention the impact on professional drivers and all the industry that supports like roadhouses and cafés, people said things like "they can retrain to do other things, like software programming". Because you know, there is no way in the world that coding can be automated... Again, people are short-sighted. Anything codifiable can be automated, and with the right code to deal with exceptions like we have know with artificial intelligence, essentially we are in the realm of anything a human can do, can be automated.
But at least for now, that isn't completely true. It is only true in the things that we do outside of us, and especially the things we do to add financial value to the economy. And when it comes to the economy and the profit maximisation model used, it means that as soon as it become possible and cheaper to automate a process rather than use a human, it will be done. Even at some point the jobs "safest" from replacement by automation like plumbing, will be automated by robots and AI. Not only that, a lot of the things that makes the difference between plumbers, will become obsolete, because standardisation will very quickly mean that there is massive simplification from what we currently do.
Thankfully, lawyers will become obsolete too.
So, while not all of this is possible now, the way technology advances means that automation capabilities will continue to speedup and with the help of AI improvement also, Something like Moore's Law is an irrelevant model. It described the past for computing power, but it no longer fits for the future, since the speed of AI development has already far outstripped the expression and will continue to do so. This means that a lot of the things most of us are yet to even imagine, will be brought forward in the timeline at an increasing speed, and this shift is going to change everything about how we live our lives.
Very little of what we can do, will be in demand.
So, what then?
I don't know. It is impossible to predict what will actually happen, but the problem we are continually facing already today is that we are living in the past already, trying to maintain what should already be obsolete. Look at the current "energy crisis" and recognise that it isn't necessary. If we had invested into better energy sources decades ago, none of what is currently happening would be possible over oil, because the demand for oil and gas would be so low. Instead though, we live in a world not too distant from the 1800s, still looking for new oil wells and ways to make profit from it. And while the people with the power might not have the desire to solve the energy problem, what if an AI works it out? And once one AI has a somewhat viable solution, all AI's can iterate it further.
As I was saying to a client yesterday, wellbeing of humans is where the only real possible future for humanity lays, because if we focus on anything else we are going to make ourselves completely obsolete. The economy only works because there are people and if those people are not growing themselves, they are going to become an economic burden and left to die.
In Finland, there are thousands of new empty apartments that have no one to live in them, because immigration has been cut, and the birth rate is far below the replacement rate. The housing markets in the regional areas are decimated and you can't even give some of the properties away. This is happening in many places globally. At the same time, some places with high immigration like Australia are having housing crises, where there aren't enough affordable homes. They have the immigration, but they haven't prepared the infrastructure for it, which has then put a lot of emphasis on how bad immigration is.
This point isn't about automation, it is about how people drive the economy. But people who are unable to bring value to the local economy in other ways, become a burden and end up causing conflict, among people. However, it isn't going to only be the immigrants who are out of work, because automation is going to put almost everyone out of work in time, which means that unless there are changes in the way the economy functions, all humans become an economic burden on the economy, unable to pay for goods and services, unable to pay for rents or buy houses, and unable to do anything other than take support to survive. The retirement systems collapse, the welfare systems collapse, the social structures collapse, and wellbeing collapses across the board.
When humans collapse, humanity collapses.
So if humanity collapses, what is the point of doing any of this at all? It doesn't matter how efficient production is if there are no customers. It doesn't matter how brilliant technology is if no one has access. Without humans, none of what we do now, or where we are heading, matters.
That means that if we want to make what we do relevant, we have to ensure that we are relevant in the economic system, and in what the economy does. Currently, in many different forms, we are customers, but we can only be customers because we have something (money) to trade, which comes through work, handouts (work of others) or theft. In a production systems where we are non-producers, we end up with nothing to trade, so can't be customers. Not only does life suck for us, but the economy collapses, which is the opposite of the goal of all the economic activity ongoing now.
Capitalism (as we have used it) doesn't just eat itself because it monopolises, it eats itself because it will eventually lead to a situation where there aren't enough customers to support it. Which is why the focus needs to shift away from making money as the goal, to improving wellbeing as the goal. This doesn't break capitalism, it just shifts the focus of activity from a conceptual token, to human wellbeing. And in so doing, it directs all manner of activity, because the "reward" of the economy is measured in the improvement of humanity. The most rewarded goods and services aren't the ones that make efficiencies for profit maximisation, they make efficiencies for human wellbeing development.
I don't know where the future lays, but I predict that if we continue along the antiquated path we are on, we are going to make ourselves obsolete as a species far sooner than many might think, even if we don't blow ourselves out of the universe with our own technology first.
Taraz
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