When The Future Doesn’t Need Us
Today, the world is made of people. This gives people a tiny measure of<br>leverage: factory workers can sabotage the machines and halt production, truck<br>drivers can strike and halt the entire economy, the police can stand back and<br>let a protest topple the government, the military can<br>mutiny. This sets a limit to how much the powerful can abuse the<br>powerless: no matter how powerful someone is, how much money they have, how many<br>divisions they command, they are still embedded in a society. They need other<br>people to survive, and to maintain their quality of life. And those people can,<br>essentially, veto the political order by withdrawing their contribution to it.
AI changes this. If AI works the factories, drives the trucks, does most of the<br>white collar work, fights the wars, then humans become materially powerless. We<br>lose one type of leverage against power. We become disempowered. When<br>people talk about AI taking jobs, the main problems they worry about are poverty<br>and meaning, but I think more people should be worried about disempowerment.
But what if there is no mass unemployment? After all, we’ve spent two hundred<br>years automating one job after another, and every advanced economy is de facto<br>at full employment. We keep discovering new, higher-level, better-paying jobs to<br>do. So maybe the AIs take today’s jobs, and humans move one level up, to work<br>newer jobs. Alex Imas, in What will be scarce?, describes<br>what this looks like:
As commodity production gets automated, income and employment flow toward the<br>sectors with high income elasticity: what I am calling the relational sector,<br>including the arts but also care, education, hospitality, therapy, personal<br>services, craftsmanship, and community, where the human element is part of the<br>value.
[…]
If the model is right, the durable jobs of the future won’t be about<br>monitoring AI systems or prompt engineering. Those are transitional roles in<br>the automated sector. The durable jobs will be in the relational sector, where<br>the human element is the product itself.
Some already exist and are growing: nurses, therapists, teachers, boutique<br>fitness instructors, personal chefs, bespoke tailors, craft brewers, live<br>performers, spiritual guides, childcare workers, and many varieties of<br>hospitality and care work. Others are emerging: experience designers, human-AI<br>collaboration artists, provenance certifiers, community curators. Many haven’t<br>been invented yet, just as six out of ten jobs people hold today didn’t exist<br>in 1940.
So, in this world, we get mass job displacement, but not mass unemployment. I<br>argue that in this world, we’d still be disempowered.
The Argument
If all the podcasters in the world go on strike, what happens? Nothing. Same for<br>the boutique fitness instructors, personal chefs, craft brewers, etc. The<br>problem with the “relational economy” is that while these jobs are generally<br>nicer than working in manufacturing, and might pay better, they put you further<br>away from material reality. A worker at an assembly line can sabotage the<br>machines; whereas an executive sitting in an office on the other side of the<br>country, what material power do they have? It’s not like the factories are all<br>rigged to blow, as a “pull lever in case of nationalization” contingency. I<br>doubt even Elon would do that.
In a sense it’s the dual version of being a medieval peasant. Peasants had a lot<br>of material leverage—they grew all the food—but were illiterate and poor and<br>dispersed, so they could not coordinate to exploit that leverage. People in<br>industrial societies are literate, relatively wealthy, and concentrated in urban<br>centers: they have material leverage and the ability to exploit it. People in<br>post-AI societies will be in constant communication, they may be literate and<br>educated, but they will have no material power whatever. And so they will have<br>no way to physically withdraw the consent of the governed.
In the post-AGI world, people have no way to withdraw the consent of the<br>governed. They can’t resist economically, because they are economically<br>unnecessary: if they still have jobs, they won’t be materially vital jobs. Even<br>if they could resist, they can’t coordinate their resistance, because AGI will<br>make mass surveillance (the physical and legal infrastructure for which already<br>exists) a thousandfold more effective, since with intelligence too cheap to<br>meter, you can have a superhumanly-capable intelligence analyst assigned to each<br>human. And if the AIs fight the wars, they can also fight the civil wars. So<br>people can’t resist violently either, because drones controlled by powerful AGI<br>almost certainly have a better K/D ratio than humans with rifles (and are<br>cheaper to build).
Who has power in this world? The few humans who give orders to the powerful AIs<br>that control the killing machines. And probably not for long, since sooner or<br>later those humans will be usurped by their AIs.
It might be the case that liberal democracies...