Engleski A - 2021. ljeto, reading 2.

Robot Future

Robin Hanson, one of the authors who writes about the future, thinks the robot takeover, when it comes, will be in the form of emulations. This means you take, for example, the best and brightest 200 human beings on the planet, you scan and copy their brains to 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. These robots called Ems, being superior at everything and having no material needs that couldn’t be satisfied virtually, will undercut humans in the labour market, and make us totally unnecessary. We will all effectively be retired.

When Hanson presents his forecast in public, one question always comes up: what’s to stop the Ems killing us off? “Well, why would they?” he responds. The Ems, being modelled on us, will share some combination of gratitude, empathy and affection for humans. These robots will be much more than just the crude hardware and brutal machines so beloved of Hollywood.

Opinion on the precise shape of the robot future remains divided: some argue that artificial intelligence robots will be the first to achieve world domination. This future offers less hope than Hanson’s – lacking empathy, those robots wouldn’t have a sentimental affection for us as their creators. But this future is essentially the same as it predicts the rise of the useless class: humans who are confused about what to study because they have no idea what skills will be needed by the time they finish, who can’t work because there’s always a cheaper and better robot, and who spend their time doing nothing much and staring at screens.

Hanson argues that artificial intelligence is moving too slowly. However, to make Ems possible, only three technologies need to coincide: faster and cheaper computers, which the world has in hand; brain scanning, which is being worked on by a much smaller but active biological community; and the modelling of the human mind, which, he admits, in contrast to artificial intelligence, is hard to predict.

But all the predictions lead to the same place: the disappearance of human labour. Even if a robot takeover is some ways away, this idea has already become high-priority in specific sectors. Driverless cars are forecast to make up 75% of all traffic by 2040, leading not just to thousands of unemployed drivers, but also to the transformation of all of the infrastructure around the job, from training to petrol stations.

The critical question is: in a workless world, how do we distribute resources? It is a question articulated precisely by Stephen Hawking, when he noted: “Everyone can enjoy a life of serious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”