Lead Us Towards Work?

 A New York Times article yesterday surveyed the budding anti-AI movement across the country that has sprung up in the least likely places and brought together people of wildly different ideological persuasions. It seems the days of Captain Swing and Ned Ludd have come again, and chiefly for the same reasons: elites are forging ahead with a technological change that will radically undermine the livelihoods of millions—and they have no clear plan as to how this is all supposed to work out in a way that is tolerable for the human population. 

Indeed, the people most involved in developing the new technology openly tell you that it will probably cause massive employment displacement—at least in the short term. Some of the more starry-eyed AI boosters envision that it could soon eclipse the need for human cognitive labor entirely—setting the market value of human brain power at something close to zero. 

How are hundreds of millions of Americans—let alone billions of people across the planet—supposed to earn a living in such a future? 

The developers of AI say: the government ought to get on that one. 

And so we turn to government, and say: "so guys, what's the plan here?" And that's when we have the disconcerting realization that there is no plan. 

As one of the people quoted in the Times article puts it: "Given A.I. and robotics are going to impact every man, woman and child in this country, one might think that there’d be a massive debate in the United States Congress: What does it mean? Where do we go? How do we deal with it?" But no, he adds—this conversation has never occurred. "There has been minimal, minimal discussion."

As Thomas Carlyle wrote in Past and Present—in the midst of the first industrial revolution that was displacing thousands of workers and upending the livelihoods of millions: "Behold us here, so many thousands, millions [...] We are right willing and able to work; [....] We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead us,—by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of Time? Or if you declare that you cannot lead us? And expect that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of starvation?  What is it you expect of us?  What is it you mean to do with us?"

That is indeed the question for our time as well—the question we all are asking the technology companies that are displacing the need for human brains and the politicians who are watching it happen. "What is it you mean to do with us?" "Will you lead us toward work?" To which they say—we don't know what work will still be valued in this brave new world or where it might exist. To which we ask: are we simply to stand here and "in a composed manner perish of starvation?"

I have never been a fan of universal basic income as a panacea, as readers of this blog know. It seems too dependent on the political whims of the majority and the centers of economic power to keep the funds flowing indefinitely. A world where the majority of the American population is dependent on Congress for monthly subsistence payments has never struck me as desirable, dignified, or sustainable. 

But if the AI developers are even half-way correct in their predictions, such a program—or an AI dividend, to roll out the program under a more modest monicker—may be our only alternative to mass disemployment and hunger. 

The argument for a moral right and entitlement to such a dividend is quite sound as well. As others have pointed out before me, AI models are developed using the input of our collective creative work on the internet. We all played a role in making the content and culture by which these models are trained. The creation of these machine minds has been a collective effort. And so, the general public is entitled to partake in the proceeds—not merely to be displaced, cast off, or sent to the glue factory as outworn "meat" that has served its purpose. 

As one of the protest signs in the Times article puts it: "AI steals your work to steal your job." I am reminded of the words of Carl Sandburg, when he was speaking in the voice of "the people, the mob": "The best of me is sucked out and wasted." As another recent New York Times essay put it: "We live under the sign of the vampire."

Perhaps, then, our vampiric tech billionaires don't want to share the spoils that they have sucked out of the rest of us? Many have already shifted to the right—including, most recently, Sergey Brin—over opposition to California's proposed "billionaire tax." Elon Musk, during his short and ignominious stint in government, left behind as his most visible policy legacy the evisceration of global antipoverty programs that kept hundreds of millions of hungry children and elders alive. The idea that he would want to support Americans indefinitely through paying them monthly checks not to work seems hard to credit. 

Meanwhile, Peter Thiel is out there publicly proclaiming that people who want to regulate AI development or impose any guardrails on the technology are literally the Antichrist.

But if these men understood even their own self interest in a more enlightened way—they would see that they will preserve more of their wealth now by a strategic concession to a partially redistributive dividend than by waiting for unemployment and poverty to reach catastrophic proportions later on. 

As John Maynard Keynes once put it—in his 1923 Tract on Monetary Reform—the state must have the power to interfere with property and contract rights up to a point—if these rights are to continue to exist at all: "[N]othing can preserve the integrity of contract between individuals, except a discretionary authority in the State to revise what has become intolerable. [...] Those who insist that in these matters the State is in exactly the same position as the individual, will, if they have their way, render impossible the continuance of an individualist society, which depends for its existence on moderation."

Sometimes, in other words, you may need to destroy capitalism in order to save it. 

The alternative policy—of simply letting this play out by means of laissez faire—will doom the very system of property rights and free contract that our libertarian tech elites most want to preserve. 

The displaced workers, after all, will not simply "in a composed manner perish of starvation," as Carlyle put it. It is not in the nature of most humans to starve in such a manner. People will instead—like Heine's displaced Silesian weavers—curse the society that subjected them to this fate and bring about its downfall.