TOM EATON | Don’t gaslight us into thinking AI is helplessly and inevitably racing us off a cliff

A respected UK futurist says that robots and artificial intelligence will “replace visually all human labour within 20 years” and I have questions, mostly about when the shooting will start and why the press is gaslighting us so hard about why this is all happening.

According to a feature in the Guardian on Wednesday, Adam Dorr and his team have researched how humans have adopted and adapted to technological changes over thousands of years and have “concluded that the current wave will not just convulse but obliterate the labour market by 2045”.

No sector will be spared, says Dorr: whatever a human can do, machines will soon be able to do it better and at a fraction of the cost.

I believe him. If AI was being developed to produce fake Richard Attenborough posts on Facebook so your elderly uncle can marvel at puppies sleeping in flowers, or to help you write emails because ChatGPT has already atrophied your ability to write eight words in a row, I’d agree with those who pooh-pooh the whole thing as alarmist nonsense.

But AI isn’t being developed to help us free our inner artists or be better at our jobs. It’s being developed to oversee automated farms, and automated factories, and automated trucking fleets and supertankers and ports and accounting departments and legal firms and classrooms.

The Guardian isn’t alone. It’s everywhere across the media spectrum, regardless of political leanings, a subtext as clear and consistent as if a Bell Pottinger memo has been sent out: the algorithms and robots are doing all of this, and whatever they end up doing will be as inevitable and unstoppable as periods of global warming and cooling.

It’s being developed to maximise profits by maximising efficiency, and that means removing the most inefficient part of late capitalism: those expensive, unreliable organic blobs of malcontent called human being, with their anti-capitalist need to eat and sleep, or take bathroom breaks, or have babies, or think thoughts about their working conditions.

Which brings me back to my questions about this future in which we’re all going to be twiddling our thumbs at home 20 years from now.

First, I’m curious to know how this utopian economic model is going to work once 99% of humanity is destitute and the global population starts crashing in earnest.

Who is going to buy the food and products made by the robot workers, with what money? Or is the plan simply that the centibillionaires are going to seal themselves into their bunkers and curl up on their share certificates like Smaug the dragon on his pile of gold, dreaming of a time in which we’ll all be dead and they can come out and repopulate the world with chinless nepo-spawn?

And speaking of mass death: given that the end of human employment will unleash societal chaos and violence on a scale not seen for centuries, when do Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos and Thiel plan to start developing killer robots to keep themselves safe from billions of machete-wielding people with nothing to lose?

Or — and this is the most pressing question right now — have they instead decided that it might just be cheaper to get the global media to start gaslighting us now already, convincing us that this is all very big and complicated but also entirely inevitable and therefore not something you should try to stop?

You can even see it in that worthy Guardian article despite the piece’s politely pessimistic angle: “Robots and artificial intelligence will dominate the global economy within a generation and put virtually the entire human race out of job.”

It’s dramatic. Scary. But it’s also completely devoid of any human culprits, and any suggestion that they should stop what they’re doing.

If the Guardian published a piece quoting an expert who believes that climate change will destroy humanity in the next 20 years, half of that piece would be about the polluters and the politicians they buy who are responsible for accelerating man-made climate change; but when it’s AI and robots, well, they’re just sort of going to happen, and really what can anyone do?

The Guardian isn’t alone. It’s everywhere across the media spectrum, regardless of political leanings, a subtext as clear and consistent as if a Bell Pottinger memo has been sent out: the algorithms and robots are doing all of this, and whatever they end up doing will be as inevitable and unstoppable as periods of global warming and cooling.

It’s an enormous and possibly fatal cop-out, but perhaps it’s less complicated (and more profitable?) for media companies to print: “Robots and artificial intelligence will dominate the global economy within a generation and put virtually the entire human race out of job,” rather than this, more honest paraphrase:

“Robots and artificial intelligence are the tools whereby billionaires who have demonstrated considerable contempt for humanity and the environment, as well as a fondness for fascism, will continue to dominate the global economy; billionaires who will, within a generation, deliberately commit economic genocide, putting the entire human race out of a job and thereby killing hundreds of millions and possibly billions of people, all to accumulate more wealth than anyone could ever spend in 10 lifetimes.”

None of this is normal. None of this is inevitable. And we should be suspicious of anyone who says it is.