Scientists like to picture an utopia, where humans live in eternal happiness, served by machines and not having to work. Indeed, many of my friends, whom I acquainted with in the electrical engineering or physics departments, seem to share such unlimited optimism, but somehow excluded from the positive air, I always look at the pessimistic side. Where did we diverge to drastically different views? This is what I don’t understand. Optimists, pray tell me where I get it wrong.
With the advance of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence alike, machines are becoming better and better; they are faster, cheaper, more accurate, and never having to rest. Optimists think humans will excel at more creative jobs, leaving the routine tasks to machines; but pessimists doubt these jobs are sufficient in number, or existent at all. To compose a meaningful poem or construct a movement in sonata form, computers have a long way to go; but they are more than serviceable to generate background music for games and automatic replies for customer service. Even doctors and lawyers start to seek computer’s help when finding patterns in innumerable cases. To be sure, there are plenty of “creative” jobs machines can qualify for, if not all of them at present.
If machines really would replace our jobs, optimists gather there will be novel, irreplaceable jobs unimaginable to us by now; yet when pessimists ask them what they are, they have no idea. In the Documentary short ‹Humans Need Not Apply›, we imagine two horses were having a conversation a hundred years ago, as thus. One horse feared that cars were going to replace horses; another horse believed that it was to be a good thing that they no longer had to carry goods and gallop on the battlefield, and there would be more effortless jobs awaiting them. As it turned out, the demand for horses was clearly decreasing. Now they are mostly used for sports, movies, and mountain rangers. Ridiculous as it is, aren’t human beings dreaming of the same?
If most people are unemployed, to optimists, all they have to do is relax in the beautiful new world. Maybe the surplus resource is enough for everybody to share, so we no longer have to work, and we may rest, travel, and pursue hobbies at our heart’s desire. Nevertheless, pessimists wonder where our money comes from. Perhaps rephrased more simply, labor, though a torture to many of us, is the only peaceful way to reliably allocate resources. We let the invisible hand to distribute the wealth, not ideally but better than nothing. The fewer jobs there are, the more poor people there are; it is that simple. Machines do produce a lot of products, but these can’t be sold by then: the bourgeois class is vanishing, and the robots don’t purchase.
If such social inequality becomes heated, some believe there will be efforts to reorganize the wealth; maybe unconditional basic income is at hand. But what if the society breaks down before reformation could happen? Democracy took some 150 years, from 1789 to 1945, to mature, and not even peacefully. All the more, we don’t have a hundred years to save humanity. There will be upheavals both domestic and international. Domestically, inequality will lead to riots; without traditional jobs, violence is the only remaining way of distribution. Internationally, as the core countries exploit the periphery countries, fascism will arise during the chaos in the latter, and the third world war is a matter of time.
Computers can serve us and save our labour, and it too can deprive us of our jobs and undermine our economy. But to pessimists like me, it is more an express train, which we think will head to heaven, but falls into hell, and we are too scared to look out of the window. With such a risk unparalleled in history, the optimists are like, “the ship will cross the bridge when it comes over”; is that a responsible attitude which scientists should have?
❧ April 4, 2021; extended August 16, 2021