By Antonio Garcia Martinez
The session was originally titled “Chaos Monkeys: A silicon
valley adventure”, and was supposed to be in reference to the book written by
the lecturer, about his experience in silicon valley. Instead, he decided he was tired of telling
that story and wanted instead to discuss something he felt was much more
important, which is the future of society in the face of AI and automation.
Chaos monkeys is a software system written by Netflix, which
randomly shuts down servers and does general havoc in their systems, so they
can see how well they can react to problems that happen. The Tech industry, said the speaker, is the
chaos monkey of the world; it throws things out of whack and lets the world
deal with it as much as it can.
He talked a little about his background, starting off in the
financial industry (prompted to join it by reading “Liar’s Poker” by Michel
Lewis), and eventually wound his way into Facebook, where he experienced a type
of insanity that can happen when very young people have a company drenched in
money. He also talked about his
background – his grandparents fled Spain because of Franco, to go to Cuba; his
parents fled Cuba because of Castro, to the US.
He joked his grandparents fled Europe because of fascism, his parents
fled Cuba because of Communism, and now he’ll be fleeing the US because of
capitalism. After that he moved on the
topic of automation taking over.
He started by talking about trucking, which everyone agrees
is one of the first places where driver automation will take place. Commercial driving is the most common job in
20 US states, and the last well-paying job an uneducated person can have (~$73k
salary). There are 3.5 million truckers,
at least half of them will lose their jobs in the coming 10 years or so.
Automation, he said, is the triumph of capital over labor,
with labor becoming obsolete and powerless.
As automation advances, more and more people are put out of a job, and
the strength of labor is decreased. Simultaneously,
automation can reduce the costs of goods and services substantially. Still, if you have no job and no income, even
cheap goods are hard to come by.
He quoted an article by Peter Frase, which described four
possible futures, given the question of abundance vs. scarcity, and whether the
society is equitable or hierarchical (full article here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/).
|
|
Equality
|
Hierarchy
|
|
Abundance
|
Communism
|
Rentism
|
|
Scarcity
|
Socialism
|
Exterminism
|
The first is a combination of abundance, mixed with
equality, which the article describes as communism and the target utopian state
of humanity. He didn’t get into that
part of it.
If we have abundance of resources and goods, which the
technological age may provide (3D printers, automation of production reducing
its price to be negligible), then one way to preserve a hierarchy of power and
imbalance would be to license the ability to use the technology, to maintain an
artificial scarcity of it. This is
similar to DRM-ing software, which can be copied infinitely with almost no
costs, and maintaining digital rights and copy protection laws. Then you “rent” the permission to get any
sort of product or service you want, and you still have a money based hierarchy
of those who have and those who don’t, even though technically there is the
ability to provide everyone with anything.
It is possible that even with automation we will run into
scarcity of resources (there’s only so many minerals and physical material
available to be used in the world). If
we have scarcity of resources, then if equality is maintained among people, you
have socialism, which again is a form of political government that he did not get
into.
The last future is one where there is resource scarcity, but
there are still powerful ruling elites who preserve a hierarchy of people. In this case, there can be several ways to
deal with the people who don’t have jobs but need resources:
A system of universal living wage could be used to ensure
everyone has access to basic living. This
will divide society into two – those with jobs or resources, who can live at a
higher quality of life, and those without them, who subsist on basic
income. Martinez says this type of
situation happened before – at some points in the Roman Empire’s history, 30%
of people were getting their daily bread from the government. Today as well the welfare system is propping
up a very large number of people who do not have or cannot get jobs – if you
factor in people who get disability benefits, you get to over 20% in some
states. He notes that not everyone
getting disability benefits actually has disabilities; some of them just can’t
get jobs. So the sum of unemployment and
disability recipient represents the true size of the non-working. However these are never stable situations, as
the poor rarely put up long term with the disparity.
Another option is for the rich/powerful to physically move
away to a place where the others can’t reach – there are a number of science
fiction stories detailing this type of scenario (Elysium as an example).
The direst dystopian future is one where the masses are just
killed off, and again, there are science fiction stories around these types of
scenarios (Logan’s run, In Time).
In the past, those who were pushed into poverty would
revolt, and he gave an example of the battle of Blair Mountain, in which
disenfranchised coal miners in Virginia staged the largest uprising in US
history after the civil war (but most revolutions around the world are rooted
in inequity). In the case of the Blair
Mountain revolt, the miner’s lost after the US army intervened in favor of the
mine owners. In a future where we are
creating robotic soldiers who are far more powerful than the ability of humans
to engage with, such an uprising will be even more impossible. As an example, the work down now by Boston
Dynamics, who are creating robots for military application:
This image is a
man trying to push the robot down, to show how well its balance is. In future conflict, this will literally be
the type of match-up between humans and robots.
He didn’t really have a positive ending, so to avoid ending
on a depressed note, he showed a picture of his newborn baby.
No comments:
Post a Comment