Here is a brief timeline of human labour:
• Before
the Industrial Revolution, human labour was divided into highly
skilled, well-paid artisans who were in great demand; and unskilled
manual labour that was used on an ad-hoc basis as and when they were
required.
• During
the Industrial Revolution, large, costly factories were created that
needed people to be at a specific place at a specific time. The
concept of the "job" was created and in return for a job,
vast numbers of people were required to move to the close vicinity of
the factories and became slaves to the machine which told them when
they could work and when they could rest and how much they would be
paid. Because the humans were subservient to the machines, their work
was dumbed down until by the time of Henry Ford, people just became
minor cogs in a mass-prodution machine. The term "Luddite"
now refers to the uneducated and superstitious who want to stop
progress. In actual fact, the Luddites were well-paid, highly
skilled, self-employed workers who were being put out of business by
machines that didn't do as good as job as them but could do a
passable one cheaper. Their argument was that automation wasn't
progress. But as the work dumbed down, it meant that it was easy to
automate more and more of it as the machines became more
sophisticated.
• Then
we come to the Post-Industrial Revolution also known as the Knowledge
Revolution. Although first referred to in 1969, it didn't really take
off until the Eighties. What happened was that the machines became so
sophisticated that they allowed people to free themselves from
standard employment. So you had the development of remote workers who
were no longer tied to a specific location and flexible hours so
people could start moulding their work around their lives instead of
the other way around. So what happened? Well, machines that allowed
people to act smarter became affordable so more people started to act
smarter. Ironically, at the very time that machines are encouraging
us to take back our freedom, people have started wailing and
screaming that the machines are enslaving us. And, at a time when
they are making it more relevant to be human, people started wailing
and screaming that the machines are making us irrelevant and are
going to be able to kill us. Even Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking got
caught up in this "thinking". To be fair, this is a typical
human reaction to change and the unknown. The "job" is
dying and people didn't know what was going to come next so, of
course, they decide that the absolute worst is going to happen. In 15
years time, people are going to look back on this time and wonder
what all the fuss was about just in the same way we look back now and
wonder why people got so aerated over the "Millennium Bug"
that was going to destroy the world at midnight on January 1, 2000.
So,
where does that leave us in 2020?
Well,
what can be automated will continue to be automated. So expect
driverless cars and to go into fast food restaurants and pick your
selection from a touch screen rather than talk to a human.
But
there is a massive problem with automation. You can only automate a
process that is both fully understood and is required to be done many
times. And this is the blot that advocates of machine intelligence
try to paint over and ignore. It's been said that when Columbus set
off, he didn't know where he was going. When he arrived, he didn't
know where he was and when he left, he didn't know where he'd been.
But, in spite of that, he changed the way we view the world. That is
a perfect description of science. We continually discover stuff we
weren't even looking for. That can't be automated. Now we know where
America is, we can automate pilotless ships to cross the Atlantic.
Until then, automation was useless.
So
what about human labour? Well, I see a time when humans will be free
to do what humans do best: create. When I say that I usually get the
response
"Ah
but, Phil, we can't have 7 billion artists, poets and writers".
And I reply,
"So
who designs the bridges we drive over or the cars we drive in? Who
designs new pacemakers or a more effective cure for a disease? Do
these things just come out of thin air? Since when did 'creating'
become the exclusive domain of artists, poets and writers?"
So,
let me reduce the confusion by saying that I see a time when humans
will be free to do what they do best: create, explore and discover.
Could
the world use 7 billion more scientists and explorers? Er - yeah.
Imagine what would happen if just 10 million people decided to devote
their time and energies to curing cancer - would that make a
difference?
People
say knowledge is doubling every 12 months and soon it will be every
12 hours. This is incorrect. The amount of bullshine is doubling
every 12 months. The world isn't going to be improved by another
billion tweets about Kim Kardashian or Mickey Mouse. Real knowledge
is increasing at a much, much slower rate. Why? Lack of funding. If
it's not a popular area, it doesn't get as much funding. You can see
this at work in charity fundraising too. But what if people were
allowed to spend their own time and resources on whatever they felt
important and were able to do so because they'd been freed from
drudge work through automation? Would that change the world? Do we
think we might get some people wanting to solve our pollution
problems? Or make safer houses in earthquake zones? Or just finding
ways to make more people happier?
What's
the alternative? We do away with automation and keep people chained
to work that they're massively overqualified to do. I have said that
if a human is in a job that can be automated, the job should be
automated because you're wasting the human. I still believe that.
AI
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