How does a world without jobs add up?
When the super-rich Rishi Sunak interviewed the impossibly rich Elon Musk about artificial intelligence, one particular moment grabbed the attention of commentators. Hours earlier at Bletchley Park — the centre known for its breaking of the Nazi Enigma code during World War II — the UK Prime Minister had made reassuring noises about the future of employment in a world dominated by AI. Now, the eccentric billionaire Musk was saying something completely contradictory. He was making the simultaneously preposterous and discombobulating assertion that in the future no job will be needed.
There have been a number of fairly conventional and predictable responses to Musk’s claim. I guess the consensus among the optimists (particularly on LinkedIn, where people earnestly and eagerly embrace AI with the enthusiasm of passengers who’ve been told they are about to set sail on an unsinkable cruise liner), is that AI will lead to new jobs being created as well as existing ones being lost.
The benchmark for their confidence is the history of the web.
For every travel agent who is no longer employed picking brochures off a shelf in a high street store, there is someone working in customer service at lastminute.com. We don’t see so many encyclopaedia salesmen these days, but online content managers can help us understand the world through blogs and handy YouTube tutorials instead.
We humans have always managed to create work for ourselves. And when we ran out of useful stuff to do like farming, blacksmithing, building and so forth, we became management consultants and influencers. I do fear, however, that the founder of Tesla and X may be on to something. Perhaps our luck is about run out.
As I’ve observed before, one of the immediate reactions to the explosion in AI over the past year has been the obvious one: THEY’LL ALWAYS NEED PEOPLE. YOU’LL NEVER TAKE MY JOB.
We’re still very much at the denial stage of the denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance cycle.
Journalists tell themselves that people will crave articles written by real folk rather than junk churned out by bots. Middle managers think they’ll still be required to offer quality control over various outputs produced by hallucinating algorithms. Doctors think that patients will trust their judgment more than that of a robot, even though the robots are already better at diagnosis in some areas.
Maybe.
But I suspect much middle-class, white-collar, well-paid work is indeed under severe threat from these new technologies in the next decade or so. The anger stage is maybe two or three years away.
The most disconcerting aspect of Musk’s assertion, however, is the suggestion that blue-collar jobs will be replaced by AI too. If no one needs to work, that means there will have to be physical robots taking the place of roadsweepers, carers, postal workers, nurses, baristas, lumberjacks, firefighters, soldiers and a thousand other types of workers.
The physical infrastructure required and cost involved in this transformation seems pretty unimaginable. But maybe AI will itself find a way to make it happen, because it will be a lot cleverer than us.
If we are indeed going down the road imagined by the owner of Tesla and X, two questions immediately present themselves. Who owns the AI? And who controls it?
The answer, of course, may be that AI is owned — at least notionally — by a handful of behemothic businesses and individuals. The battle for control would be between those businesses and governments around the world. (For the sake of argument, let’s set to one side the scary sci-fi scenario of the AI having a life of its own and not being owned or controlled by anyone, even though we can’t unfortunately rule it out.)
If the AI generates spectacular wealth for its owners, but businesses increasingly don’t need to employ anyone in jobs, we are not confronted with some kind of utopia, but rather a complete breakdown of every current economic, social and political system around the world.
When Musk talks about no one needing to work, he does it from a position of unimaginable privilege. Most of us need to work to make money. We spend the money on the essentials of life and, if we’re lucky, have a little left over to spend on the non-essentials.
Musk perhaps imagines a world where we might choose to do a little of what we fancy, although he accepts that finding a raison d’etre could be hard. But actually, Elon, my old son, there’s something a little more fundamental at stake here. Without moolah, most of us starve, right?
What value would our voluntary work have if no one actually needed it? The answer of course is zip, nada, diddly squat.
This is one of the reasons that the tech bros of Silicon Valley have long championed radical ideas such as Universal Basic Income (UBI). They’ve been warning for some years that AI would eventually reach a tipping point that would involve a huge jobs shake-out. So maybe the state should give us all FREE money?
But where is the state getting its free money from? Especially when a large proportion of its citizens are unemployed and unable to contribute to the government coffers?
The trendy economics of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) suggests that any government with control over a fiat currency can effectively generate cash out of nothing, without getting too concerned over debt.
I admit to being pretty cynical about this.
Some governments — those in the Eurozone, for example — don’t have control over their own currency.
And in a world where trade is international, debt repayments are determined by markets, and currencies fluctuate against one another, economic fundamentals (such as a country’s natural resources, assets, productivity and volume of economic activity) are surely the key determinants of its freedom to act. Look how quickly the Truss government fell when it couldn’t make its sums add up.
Realistically, the only way we could pay for a UBI is by imposing huge taxes on the companies and individuals who profit from artificial intelligence and other businesses fuelled by it. Phenomenal levels of tax. But governments would almost certainly be completely enmeshed with the AI that these companies provide. And governments are local, whereas the AI businesses are global.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of Musk’s dystopian jobless future is that it simultaneously explodes traditional capitalist and socialist worldviews. Business has historically been built around the enterprise, labour and endeavour of people. Capitalism, according to sociologist Max Weber, developed through the work ethic inspired by Calvinism.
Marxism was a philosophy built around the competing interests of classes that have different relationships to the means of production. Workers who sell their labour have the power to deliver revolutionary change.
Now we glimpse a world with no work. I can choose to write a blog if I wish. But who’s paying my bills?
