Something For Everyone

Recently, Elon Musk met with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak. And, being Elon Musk, said some things that drew people's attention. I'm going to briefly touch on a couple of them.

"We are seeing the most disruptive force in history here," Mr. Musk said, before speculating: "There will come a point where no job is needed - you can have a job if you want one for personal satisfaction but AI will do everything.

"It's both good and bad - one of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life."

Most people picked up on the "but AI will do everything" part, and, no surprise, that tended to cause worry.

Musk had a potential answer for that problem during Thursday's conversation with Sunak. "We won't have universal basic income, we'll have universal high income," he argued. "So, in some sense it will be some sort of level up, or an equalizer, because everyone will have access to this [technology]."

And that's the second thing that I wanted to touch on. What Mr. Musk is saying here is that new technology will render human labor obsolete; but that won't be a problem, because it will also create post-scarcity.

I'm dubious about the first part of that formulation, and have no belief at all in the second. Generative "Artificial Intelligence" will render a number of jobs more efficient than they are today. In practice, given the way businesses operate, this means that it will render some number of them obsolete. Sure, it might create a number of new jobs, but there are unlikely to be anywhere near as many prompt engineers as there were formerly, writers, technical support specialists and other roles where a sophisticated auto-complete function can manage the workload. But despite the broad portfolio of things that Generative "A.I." can handle, it can't do everything, given that, by definition, Large Language Models don't create novel solutions when there's already an answer in the database, and don't understand the world in a way that allows them to understand when they've auto-completed their way into erroneous statements. Accordingly, the very natures of the systems involved leave gaps that will have to be closed by people. And this leaves open the idea that new jobs could come along that only humans could do. Artificial General Intelligence, code that can handle any cognitive task a human could perform as well (or better) than a human could perform it likely could, on the other hand, would carry a substantial risk of rendering human labor obsolete; because it wouldn't leave any gaps that it would be unable to close, outside of simply preferences.

But decades of predictions notwithstanding, Artificial General Intelligence doesn't appear to be on the horizon, and there's no current indication, that I'm aware of, that Generative A.I. is bringing it closer. I admit to not being an expert on the topic, but given that AGI would render GAI completely obsolete in short order, one would expect that were it close, people would be talking about it.

The subject of post-scarcity is a little different, because it's not really about how much stuff there is to go around. Not in the end, anyway. What creates a post-scarcity society is the fact that any given individual has the ability to access any resources they need to sustain themselves, without needing to trade for them; people aren't directly in a position of needing to rely on other people to give them necessary resources. It doesn't matter if there's enough food to feed a group of people if that food is in the hands of someone who a) has an enforceable property right over it and b) isn't interested in parting with it. Ubiquitous access to automation and artificial intelligence isn't going to suddenly gift people with access to the raw materials needed to guarantee themselves access to food, clothing and shelter, nor would it suddenly make private ownership of property obsolete in places like the United States.

And this leaves a number of people with a gnawing anxiety that advances in automation, and an expansion of the types and numbers of jobs that will be automatable, will leave them without access to resources, and nothing of sufficient subjective value to trade for them. And Mr. Musk's utopian vision is not going to be enough to assuage those concerns.