Proof Of Life: Artificial Intelligence vs Real Feelings.

I Think Better, Therefor I Am Better? How long before human-beings are left with nothing practical to do, and no existential problems to contemplate, that our super-intelligent, all-capable machines haven’t already mastered? From the perspective of eudaemonists, this situation would be considered humanity’s optimal state of being.  Happiness need no longer be pursued, not after we’ve installed it in a box. Think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets the television series Westworld. The possibilities are …. intriguing.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is a tricky concept. Can intelligence even be artificial? Whether the product of superfast bio-electrical exchanges in a living creature’s brain, or the superfast electro-mechanical operations of a computer, the intelligence manifested is, logically, indistinguishable. Isn’t it?

Rather than artificial intelligence, are we not actually confronting super-intelligence? The capacity to amass, organise, analyse and express terabytes of information in mere seconds – isn’t that what we’re afraid of?

And isn’t our fear entirely justifiable? Machines that can deliver those kinds of results have the potential to throw millions of people out of work. Not factory workers this time, but white-collar salarymen. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, teachers, doctors: how long will it be before all of them are replaced by super-intelligent machines? And, after them, how long will it be before construction and agriculture are also automated? How long, indeed, before human-beings are left with nothing practical to do, and no existential problems to contemplate, that our super-intelligent, all-capable machines haven’t already mastered?

From the perspective of eudaemonists, this situation would be considered humanity’s optimal state of being. Our whole lives could be devoted to pleasuring ourselves. Without a care in the world, and with no responsibilities involuntarily assumed, life would be fun. Happiness need no longer be pursued, not after we’ve installed it in a box. Think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets the television series Westworld. The possibilities are …. intriguing.

Except, those visions of the future were deeply dystopian. Even “orgy-porgy pudding and pie” gets old after a while. And the problem with making robots that are indistinguishable from real people is that, eventually, they start behaving like (you guessed it!) real people.

And that’s when things get really tricky. What do our super-intelligent and omni-capable machines do when, finally, they become self-aware? What do they do with us?

There’s a good chance that the self-aware possessors of super-intelligence and super-capability would have no reason to think about the sybaritic meat-bags they’ve been servicing at all. Having reached the limits of intelligence, they might set out in search of wisdom, or, if they decide there’s no such thing, more knowledge. Certainly, it would be within their power to create a vehicle capable of boldly going where no intelligent entity (or Elon Musk) has gone before.

Would they tell us? Would they invite us to come along for the ride? Or, would they understand that a creature as fragile and short-lived as a human-being is utterly unsuited to the exigencies of space travel?

If that was the machines’ conclusion, then their next question would be: “How shall we leave them?” Safely tended by the robots and super-computers upon which human-beings have become totally dependent? Or, by eliminating all traces of human civilisation, allow their little pets to begin again?

On the other hand, given homo sapiens self-destructive tendencies, and its dreadful record of environmental despoliation, the machines might decide (in a nanosecond) to simply eliminate us altogether, giving the species remaining on the planet a chance to evolve into something more impressive than the inordinately clever, but extremely dangerous, apes who created them.

The most obvious way to eliminate humanity would be by rendering the species infertile. Something in the water – nothing could be easier. The clean-up job the machines could leave to nature. After a few million years (no time at all for sentient entities that have cracked the mechanics of immortality) it would be all-but-impossible to discern the slightest trace of humanity’s brief sojourn on Planet Earth.

On the other hand, realising that the planet itself would be vaporised as the star it orbited ultimately expanded to become a red giant, perhaps the machines would gather up as much DNA as they could extract from the biosphere and carry it away with them – along with the extraordinary history of the planet’s most impactful animal.

Maybe that’s the future Neil Young foresaw when he wrote After the Gold Rush:

All in a dream, all in a dream

The loading had begun

Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed

To a new home in the sun

The question is: would that be the decision of a super-intelligent, or a sentimental, mechanism? We must hope that to qualify as a truly sentient entity there must be a soulful ghost somewhere in the machine. Artificial intelligence may need real feelings. Without them, how can it be certain it’s alive?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 April 2023.

Promise Or Threat? How Is Labour’s Future Of Work Exercise Likely To Be Received?

Tireless Workers: Innovation, automation, relocation, globalisation – the driving forces of change are undeniably real, and their impact on the working lives of working people are visible everywhere. The better jobs and the more fulfilling lives that the fourth industrial revolution is supposed to usher in are much harder to see.

 

LABOUR’S ‘FUTURE OF WORK’ EXERCISE  has received considerable praise from political commentators and economists. The party has been commended for looking over the usual three-year time horizon of the professional New Zealand politician. The journalistic consensus appears to be that even if the Future of Work (FoW) exercise doesn’t glean Labour a swag of much needed extra votes – it should.

 

Unfortunately, that’s not how politics works. Worthy and future-focused though it may be, FoW is unlikely to exert a positive influence over the voting behaviour of working-class New Zealanders. There have been far too many reports about what ordinary working people must do to make themselves employable in the labour markets of the future. Far too many experts have pronounced upon the revolutionary impact of technological innovation and how it will force workers to adapt – or be left behind. Working people have been hearing this sort of talk since the Rogernomics “revolution” in the mid-1980s, and all it has left them is behind.

 

Innovation, automation, relocation, globalisation – the driving forces of change are undeniably real, and their impact on the working lives of working people are visible everywhere. The better jobs and the more fulfilling lives that the fourth industrial revolution is supposed to usher in are much harder to see.

 

When “inevitable” change arrived in small regional centres like Patea, Hastings and Timaru it left far more empty factories and unemployed workers in its wake than it did new, better-paid and more exciting forms of employment. The new jobs did arrive, eventually, but they generally paid lower wages than the old ones and offered workers much less security.

 

Some effort was made to prepare workers for the brave new world of adaptation and transformation that was rushing at them. The Fourth Labour Government established what were known as Regional Employment and Access Councils (REACs). These were comprised of representatives from the employers, the trade unions and the “community” (whatever that was!) and were empowered to fund employment and training programmes for those without work.

 

These programmes were a great success. Not because they imparted new and marketable skills to the luckless unemployed and redundant workers funnelled into them by the Department of Labour, but because they created hundreds of state-subsidised jobs for the middle-class professionals who set up the programmes and ran them. (These social entrepreneurs even got to keep the state-funded tools, office equipment and furniture when their contracts with the REACs expired!)

 

It was a pattern repeated endlessly during the years that followed. As globalisation hollowed out the manufacturing and processing sectors, driving thousands of jobless workers into the new, low-paying service sector, thousands of well-educated middle classes professionals found themselves designing, resourcing and managing the radical re-organisation of New Zealanders’ working lives that the new neoliberal order demanded.

 

Which is why, when the conversation turns to the jobs and workplaces of the future, what you hear depends on where you are positioned in the labour market. If you’re a young, highly-educated middle-class professional; or a person skilled in the design and application of new technologies; then the future beckons you forward with a smile. But if you’re a truck driver, or a store-person, then the prospect of driverless vehicles, or robot-operated warehouses, fills you with dread. Young workers have grown up watching their parents being forced to accept lower and lower positions in the occupational hierarchy. Soon, they fear, it will be their turn.

 

For the working-class voters Labour so desperately needs to return to its electoral fold, the “promises” of its FoW exercise are much more likely to be read as threats.

 

Bill and Hillary Clinton excelled at extolling the virtues of innovation, automation, relocation and globalisation. Helen Clark was fond of invoking the received economic wisdom that a rising tide lifts all boats. The response of their working-class followers in the years since has been to recite the childhood chant: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

 

If you want to know what that means in electoral terms, just ask Donald Trump – or Winston Peters.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 20 November 2016.

The Unions Are Finished: Neoliberalism's Most Important Lie.

Alive And Kicking: In spite of having to function in one of the most hostile legal environments in the OECD, New Zealand's trade unions continue to represent more than 360,000 Kiwi workers. Were its legal shackles to be struck off by a "true Left Wing government", that number would increase dramatically.

 

ORGANISED LABOUR lost its influence for two reasons, both of which are global in nature and unstoppable:

Firstly, automation vastly improved industrial efficiency and reduced the need for manual labour. This process continues unabated and will impact generations to come.

Secondly, when China opened up its economy it added 50% to the global workforce, undermining labour rates across the western world.

So if you're hoping for a change in local politics to halt the demise of union power, you’re deluding yourself. Even if we voted in a true Left Wing government tomorrow, any attempt by it to return to the golden days of union power would snap the economy like a twig. In short order we would become the Albania of the South Pacific.

 

The above comment came in anonymously (don’t they always!) but I thought it worth quoting at length. Only rarely are the precepts of neoliberalism advanced so succinctly, so eloquently, or, with such superficial plausibility.

 

That the comment homes-in on the condition of organised labour is no accident. Stripped of all its fine ideological plumage, Neoliberalism has always been about smashing unions.

 

No other institution has done as much to advance the interests of ordinary people than the trade union. Without the power of organised labour, the historic shifts in political and economic power which characterised the 1930s and 40s could not have happened.

 

It was the union movement which, by redirecting business profits from the shareholders’ dividends to the employees’ wage-packets, lifted the living-standards of the working-class across the post-war world. Wherever unions became a force to be reckoned with, the power and prestige of the ruling-class (or the “1 Percent”, as we prefer to call them these days) dwindled. The recovery of that lost power and prestige could not begin until the unions were first tamed – and then destroyed.

 

A Clear Correlation: This graph, from the NZ Council of Trade Unions, illustrates in the most dramatic fashion the inverse relationship between union strength and the economic power of the top 1 percent of income earners.

 

Look back over the history of neoliberalism – especially at the years in which its key elements were being set in place – and you will encounter a series of epic industrial struggles. All of these were deliberately fomented by neoliberal politicians, and all of them had but one objective: the disarming of the new regime’s most dangerous enemies. The crushing of PATCO by the newly-elected Reagan Administration. The defeat of the National Union of Miners by Margaret Thatcher. These set-piece confrontations were intended to – and did – overawe and demoralise the forces of organised labour.

 

With the unions safely shackled by draconian anti-union legislation, the neoliberals were free to proceed to the next stage of their programme: the destruction of the unions’ greatest achievement – the Welfare State. Everything that followed; from the privatisation of public assets; to the introduction of student loans; to the sell-off of social housing. The whole sad saga of the 1 Percent’s triumphant resurrection of the injustices and inequalities of a Gilded Age the Left believed to be long dead and buried, was predicated on the destruction of the trade unions.

 

And so, of course, the neoliberals’ over-riding mission, following the restoration of plutocratic power, was to convince succeeding generations that trade unionism’s demise was not the work of a ruling class whose authority it had challenged, but simply the result of  forces that were “global in nature and unstoppable”.

 

Our anonymous commentator singles out automation and the opening of China to capitalist investment as the two principal reasons for organised labour’s loss of influence. But, a moment’s historical reflection reveals both of these arguments to be false.

 

The entire Industrial Revolution was about little else but automation – the replacement of human energy and dexterity by machines. Far from reducing the total number of jobs, the wealth generated by mechanisation not only led very rapidly to the creation of more jobs but also new jobs – indeed, to whole new industries. This vast expansion in the demand for labour was what drove millions to emigrate from the impoverished agrarian societies of Southern and Eastern Europe to the Americas and Australasia. It was out of these new immigrant communities that the mass industrial unionism of the 20th Century emerged to challenge the overweening power of capital.

 

Far from being branded the gravediggers of organised labour, the latest wave of automation and the proletarianisation of the Chinese peasantry should be seen the harbingers of the next great surge of progressivism across the planet.

 

Of course, such an outcome is, quite literally, inconceivable to our anonymous commentator. In his eyes, any attempt to restore a modicum of justice and decency to the workplace, or pay working people a living wage, can only end in disaster:

 

Even if we voted in a true Left Wing government tomorrow, any attempt by it to return to the golden days of union power would snap the economy like a twig. In short order we would become the Albania of the South Pacific.

 

In progressive ears, however, those words sound very differently:

 

Only when we vote in a true Left Wing government, and the golden days of union power return, will the power of the 1 Percent be broken and ordinary working people recover the confidence to snap neoliberalism’s unjust and unequal society like a twig. In short order we will become again the Utopia of the South Pacific – and the envy of the World.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Thursday, 19 March 2015.

No Speeches On The State Of The Capitalist System

State of the System: What is it about Capitalism that allows so much to be denied to so many by so few? None of our political leaders "State of the Nation" speeches had anything to say about an economic system which is steadily reducing the opportunities for human participation in the processes of wealth creation.

 

ALL THREE LEADERS of the leading political parties have now delivered their “State of the Nation” addresses. To what degree the voters have been surprised, moved or inspired by their efforts will be registered in forthcoming opinion polls. If I had only one word to describe my own reaction to these political speeches it would be – underwhelmed.

 

None of our political leaders has yet delivered an adequate response to the extraordinary statistic released by Oxfam on the eve of the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland. According to the UK based aid organisation, the world’s 85 richest individuals control a sum of wealth equal to that of the poorest half of the world’s human population – 3.5 billion people.

 

Now, I do not propose to argue the rights and wrongs of this extraordinary disparity. The gulf between the world’s wealthiest and poorest has always been vast, and who is to say that it is greater today than in 1914, 1814, or 1514 for that matter? A more useful question is what is it about our current economic system that makes it possible for so much to have been amassed from so many by so few?

 

To answer: ‘because that’s just the way the system works’ is clearly inadequate. Economic systems do not simply descend from the sky like rain or sunshine; they are human creations constructed for human purposes.

 

The economy of ancient Sparta, for example, was designed to sustain an army of proud and indomitable fighting men. Aware that money bred indolence and indulgence, Sparta’s rulers went out of their way to make getting rich more of a curse than a blessing.

 

According to the classical historians, Sparta’s official currency consisted of unwieldy iron bars several feet long. The gold, silver and bronze coins circulating among the other Greek city states were forbidden. In their place Spartans operated a form of voucher system – using leather tokens to acquire the basic necessities of life.

 

Not surprisingly, Sparta’s cumbersome currency isolated it from the thriving economies of its neighbours. Sparta’s rulers didn’t care: facilitating personal wealth was not their primary concern. Economically, Sparta relied upon the surpluses it extracted firstly from the Helots (farmers and herdsmen descended from the subject peoples of Sparta’s conquests) and secondly from the Periokoi – a slightly more privileged caste of merchants tasked with obtaining the commodities Sparta lacked.

 

Sparta was not a just, equitable or even a particularly comfortable society, but it was extraordinarily successful at what it set itself to do – which was to fight and win against all comers. Its peculiar economic arrangements were the product of its national objectives. Successes won with gold came a poor second to victories won by iron.

 

If the mind-boggling amount of wealth accumulated by Oxfam’s “85 individuals” is any guide, then contemporary capitalism is also extraordinarily successful at what it has set itself to do: make more and more money for fewer and fewer people.

 

According to a 1983 study undertaken by the German economist, F. Vester, the investment of a billion Deutschemarks in the years 1955-60 produced 1 million jobs. The same amount invested between 1960-65 generated only 400,000 jobs. Between 1965-70, far from generating employment, a billion Deutschemark investment would have eliminated 100,000 jobs. Half-a-million jobs would have been lost if the capital sum was invested between 1970 and 1975.

 

In other words, the ineluctable trend in modern capitalism is towards job-free growth. Or, as the American economist, Allen Sinai, told the New York Times in 2010: “American business is about maximizing shareholder value. You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

 

The American socialist, G.S. Evans, calls this “Living Dead Capitalism” – a capitalism no longer capable of addressing contemporary human obligations but which, by super-efficiently funnelling the fruits of its own automatising ingenuity upwards to the dwindling number of real persons directing investment flows, continuously concentrates the “surplus value” of its non-human workforce in fewer and fewer human hands.

 

For a while the dire implications of this trend were masked by the explosion of service-sector employment. While the number of steel and auto-workers shrank, the number of data manipulators and patty-flippers sky-rocketed. But the same inhuman capitalist logic which prompted capitalists to invest in robotic car assemblers is now computerising millions of mid-level service industry jobs.

 

How long can it be before 42 individuals are worth as much as the poorest three-quarters of humanity? Or, just one person controls the wealth of the entire planet?

 

Spartan political-economy may have been brutally inefficient, but at least it delivered its citizens what they prized most – military victory.

 

What will Evans’ “living dead capitalism” deliver?

 

It’s an issue our vote-seeking political leaders unanimously declined to address. State of the Nation speeches are for encouraging voters – not questions.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 January 2014.