"Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them", says Cory Doctorow. Why? Climate crisis
From Goodfon
Enjoyably heterodox thinkpiece here from the SF writer Cory Doctorow, writing in Locus Mag.
Cory essentially challenges the notion that artificial general intelligence - which threatens to replace many human skills and competences - will in any way reduce the need for human labour for the next few hundred years. The tasks and challenges of dealing with baked-in climate disruption will ensure that.
An excerpt:
I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t.
I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ”machine learning” field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine.
Not only am I an AI skeptic, I’m an automation-employment-crisis sceptic. That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us.
I’m talking about climate change, of course.
Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labour-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometres inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoonotic and insect-borne pandemics.
These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labour freed up by automation. Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future. This means that even if you indulge in a thought experiment in which a General AI emerges that starts doing stuff humans can do – sometimes better than any human could do them – it would not lead to technological unemployment.
Perhaps you think I’m dodging the question. If we’re willing to stipulate a fundamental breakthrough that produces an AI, what about a comparable geoengineering breakthrough? Maybe our (imaginary) AIs will be so smart that they’ll figure out how to change the Earth’s albedo.
Sorry, that’s not SF, it’s fantasy.
It is too late to halt the climate processes that will flood every coastal city, displace hundreds of millions of people, and sicken billions as pathogen bearing organisms seek new habitats where there is neither resistance to them nor a predator to dampen the spread of their hosts. These processes will occur irrespective of geoengineering.
To understand why, consider just one factor: the heat we’ve sunk into the oceans. The seas won’t cool until the energy trapped in their depths is expended. Which means that, to a first approximation, the ice-caps are toast. I will speculate with you about General Artificial Intelligences all night long, but I’m not here for thought experiments in which we repeal the second law of thermodynamics. That’s not scenario-building, it’s wishful thinking.
…I can see a path from here to a federal jobs guarantee. I don’t see a path from here to a General AI. If we’re going to imagine a General AI future, let’s imagine that one of the changes we make along the way is to abandon the toxic austerity worship of the neoliberal era. If we can manage that one simple trick – the trick of adding zeroes to a spreadsheet in a central bank computer – then we have no automation employment crisis.
Which is really good news, because that will free us up to address the actual crisis that we face.
Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in.
No one’s really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there.