My near-term concerns about Labor have nothing to do with jobs being handed over to robots powered by brain scans of the greatest geniuses among our species. It may seem thin gruel by comparison, but Weak AI (driverless cars, delivery drones, robot bellhops, etc.) can do plenty to destabilize society. Not only are jobs traditionally filled by humans to disappear but entire industries will rise and fall with dizzying speed. In the aggregate, this transition could be a good thing, with the resulting challenge being we need to find an answer not for scarcity but distribution. 

The futuristic scenario I presented at the opening comes from the pages of The Age of Ems: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, a speculative book by Robin Hanson, who often seems to be mid-chug on a sci-fi bender at Chalmun’s Cantina. The author feels AI is evolving too slowly in its march toward intelligent machines but his scanning scheme is close to reality. Whatever scenario is realized to bring about superintelligence, however, Hanson believes the sea change is coming very soon and everyone will be caught in its waves. In the very long run, anything is possible, but I’m not too anxious over his theory, though I plan on reading the title.

Pivoting off Hanson’s new volume, Zoe Williams has written a thoughtful Guardian piece about fashioning a stable and fair society if work is offloaded to Ems, AIs or WTFs. An excerpt:

Robin Hanson thinks the robot takeover, when it comes, will be in the form of emulations. In his new book, The Age of Em, the economist explains: you take the best and brightest 200 human beings on the planet, you scan their brains and you get robots that to all intents and purposes are indivisible from the humans on which they are based, except a thousand times faster and better.

For some reason, conversationally, Hanson repeatedly calls these 200 human prototypes “the billionaires”, even though having a billion in any currency would be strong evidence against your being the brightest, since you have no sense of how much is enough. But that’s just a natural difference of opinion between an economist and a mediocre person who is now afraid of the future.

These Ems, being superior at everything and having no material needs that couldn’t be satisfied virtually, will undercut humans in the labour market, and render us totally unnecessary. We will all effectively be retired. Whether or not we are put out to a pleasant pasture or brutally exterminated will depend upon how we behave towards the Ems at their incipience.

When Hanson presents his forecast in public, one question always comes up: what’s to stop the Ems killing us off? “Well, why don’t we exterminate retirees at the moment?” he asks, rhetorically, before answering: some combination of gratitude, empathy and affection between individuals, which the Ems, being modelled on us precisely, will share (unless we use real billionaires for the model).•