Guest post: This period of maximal disruption
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Crank them out, ladies.
A healthy populace needs steady economic growth.
Steady economic growth comes from constantly increasing productivity.
Productivity growth requires the ongoing creation of new jobs.
New jobs require an ever-growing working-age population.
That’s been the formula for the past half-century or more. But it rests on a number of assumptions that can’t stay true forever. And just because this formula has worked up until now doesn’t mean it’s the only one that can ever work.
Firstly, and most obviously, civilization can’t just keep growing and consuming forever. The planet’s size is fixed, and so are the resources within it.
Secondly, there’s no actual law that states that a healthy populace needs steady economic growth. It’s just that in a capitalist system, that’s how things have turned out. An ever increasing amount of total resources can serve as a modest counterbalance to capitalism’s tendency to concentrate resources in the hands of the few. New resources just entering the system will be distributed somewhat evenly at first before the Gordon Gekkos of the world inevitably find ways to capture them.
So how about instead we build an economic model that stops the Gordon Gekkos stealing what we already have so we don’t have to keep mining new resources to make up the losses?
And lastly, there’s the sudden emergence of AI, which may at long last uncouple the link between productivity and human-powered jobs. At the very least it will certainly disrupt such a link. Our species is running out of skills to justify our existence in pure economic terms. A human life costs a lot ot maintain — a lifetime of food, water, shelter, and energy — and under the current economic model, we’re losing opportunities to earn our keep, as we get outbidded by the automatons of Artificial Intelligence.
Things are rapidly coming to a head all around the world, with climate change, overpopulation, and now the technological disruption of labour. If civilization manages to emerge from this period of maximal disruption at all, it will have to do so with a new economic model to sustain humanity at a much lower population, with a fixed or even declining rate of consumption of the planet’s finite resources.
It would be nice of some kind of Artificial General Intelligence could find a way to orchestrate a safe passage for humans through the upcoming mess.
But I’m not particularly hopeful. When we look up at the skies, there’s a reason we aren’t seeing a universe teeming with civilized planets. More and more I’m coming to believe it’s because civilization is intrinsically doomed to wipe itself out.
I share your pessimism, Arty
As tempting as it is to think that new technology, a different political system, more/better information etc. is going to solve all our problems, I strongly suspect that the fatal, unfixable flaw of every system is human brain wiring.
I agree with every earlier part of your post, but your last sentence stepped into my Personal Pet Peeve zone.
A more likely answer is simple signal attenuation due to distance. Please banish from your mind the notion that our EM signals have been beamed outwards for anyone to intercept; signals weaken proportionally to the distance travelled squared, and… space is big.
Of course, there is also the very real possibility that we are truly alone in the Universe, or, if we’re not, that advanced technological civilizations are so rare that no civilization ever encounters another. I sure hope no one is out there eavesdropping on our communication. Being human is embarrassing enough without having an audience…
@Holms,
That’s a reasonable peeve, and I quite like your scientific thinking. I was taking some liberties for poetic effect, but I see your point. The Fermi Paradox or the Great Silence or just “Where is everyone?” — whatever we call that line of inquiry, I think it’s quite fascinating and completely worthy of being taken very seriously.
Bjarte
Personally if aliens advanced enough to get into contact with us existed, I imagine it would go something like this:
Alien scientist: We have discovered advanced life!
5 mins on social media later.
Alien scientist: Er, nope must be an equipment malfunction, nothing to see here.
Alien’s assistant: But…
Alien scientist: Nothing. To. See. Here.
True except Alien’s assistant’s response would be: God damn, you’re not kidding.
This analysis totally misunderstands how the world works.
Not so. Productivity growth comes from technological advances that allow one person to do what previously took many people.
So, for example, one person with a tractor can plough and seed land that, in the past, would have taken scores of people and many horses/oxen. In the Western world, the productivity of agrigulture (food per hectare) is at an all-time high and yet the fraction of the population needed to produce that food is at an all-time low.
No, capitalism does not tend to concentrate resources in the hands of the few, rather, it has been the greatest engine for driving the prosperity of a broad middle class that we know of. (The system that does concentrate resources in the hands of a few, keeping the rest poor, was the previous system of feudalism.)
No, utterly wrong. For example, take cars. When cars were a new resource, it didn’t start with everyone having car, then the oligarchs concentrated them in their own hands. It’s the opposite, at first only the rich had cars. Now most people do. That’s capitalism.
Ditto mobile phones. Ditto refrigerators. Ditto washing machines. Ditto just about everything.
Under capitalism, the super-rich don’t get super-rich by “stealing” what others already have. Rather, they get rich by being early into the arena of technological advances that benefit everyone.
For example, take Bill Gates. He is mega-rich because he was among the first-movers into providing everyone with cheap, accessible and easy-to-use computers. Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Technological progress increases the wealth and productivity of society as a whole. People like Bill Gates don’t get wealthy by “stealing” existing resources, they get wealthy by generating new resources that people then value. That’s capitalism.
So this whole analysis is just utterly confused about how things work. AI will be the next big techological advance that will drive mass prosperity.
This discussion reminds m,e of an interesting exchange I had yesterday. Talking with an executive charged with supporting government mandated EHR data portability. It was made clear that the company’s resources are only allocated to projects that can provide them with established markets. Innovation isn’t a priority. Like most companies, they are comfortable waiting for the market to give them a clear indication of any shifting patterns. That’s ok in an incrementalist environment. That keeps their boards and investors happy. But adoption of new technology isn’t incremental. That’s why you see some of these overnight billionaires. Profit driven corporations waiting to gain advantage from new tech, ignore the innovators until there’s a clear tipping point. Then they all rush to try to grab a piece. Problem is, by the time they are ready to move, breakaway technology leaves them behind. If they have enough money they can try and buy out the innovators, or if the inventors have had to make a Faustian bargain with venture capital, they can oust the founders and profit from their efforts. Otherwise, you may get a new Bill Gates riding in on a technology shock wave.
AI is a breakaway technology. Like all innovation there’s a lot of hype from marketing, but in this case, the reality is even more amazing. We have no idea how big of an impact it will have, but we are about to find out. 2024 will be the year of the Singularity.
So what do we do when furnishing everyone with cars, mobile phones, washing machines and everything destroys the planet? The Earth cannot support 8 billion humans at a North American or European standard of living. Even without anthropogenic climate change, our current rates of consumption will destabilize ecosystem services upon which civilization depends. Quite apart from self-serving survival interests, the rest of the biosphere consists of millions of other species, many of which we’ve even yet to name, let alone understand. Don’t they have any sort of right to continue on their own evolutionary pathways without being consumed as raw material or wiped out because plowing under their habitat will let someone plant something else that makes them money? We’re hacking at the roots of the irreplaceable bio-energetic cycles we’ve depended on for our entire existence on our planet. The wheels go round, products and profits are made, but every stroke of the axe brings us closer to disaster. How does that enter into the equation? If it doesn’t then it should.
Just because someone stands to get rich off an idea doesn’t make that idea a good one. It was once believed that uying and selling human beings and essentially working them to death was a good idea. There were some who got rich off of it. Maybe the marketplace isn’t the best judge of what we should and shouldn’t do.
But “resources” has a much broader meaning than “products.” How many factories get built in rich neighbourhoods? How many toxic waste disposal sites get located in swanky suburbs? What about the amelioration of destructive mining of rare earth metals upon which high-tech toys depends that never occurs because the third world communities that suffer are not worth the additional cost per unit that such restoration would require? Why are these people denied safe air, water and soil. Who took it from them? Sure sounds like a concentration of resources to me.
Did Bhopal happen next door to where the CEO of Union Carbide lived? In a street address sense, no. But in a global sense, yes. The compartmentalization and offloading of “externalities” to poor, powerless people has been as much a part of the development of our civilization as the transistor and the rechargeable battery. Isn’t all this part of capitalism’s drive for profit maximization? Somebody has to be a poor, contaminated peon, and it isn’t going to be the guy who owns the factory. By not looking too closely at how things are done over the horizon, beyond our sight, we don’t have see the true cost of how our sausages are made. Now that the horizon is much nearer, and very little is out of our sight, these costs are becoming more evident. There is no “downwind;” there is no “downstream.” we’re all downwind of someone, downstream of someone else. When they fluch theirwastes into the air we want to breathe, or the water we might want to drink, it comes a lot closer to home. How does capitalism deal with that, and why didn’t it do so before?
Yes, but maybe biosphere health is. If humans confiscate and monopolize the landcape to create “products” for themselves, what happens to the biomes that were uprooted and replaces with monocultures and asphalt? If our “wealth” depends upon the “resources” we’re destroying, how long can this sort of Ponzi scheme go on. It will all collapse long before the eight billion human inhabitants of Earth all have the “necessities of modern life.” Well, what about air, water, and soil? Those are pretty high up on the list of good things to have. And they can’t be manufactured or replaced.
But at what cost? I don’t see anyone coming forward to pay that bill. Adding it to the price of each widget drives the price of widgets up, and/or reduces the widget maker’s profit margin. We’re told that those are bad. And what if widgets are something we don’t need, but just something we want? How does the market distinguish between needs and frivolous desires? What if too many people choose the pretty, sparkling lihjts of the widget, but their production levels a mountaintop, displaces a village, or drains a wetland?
Maybe we should think more about getting our shit together before launching a new, untried technology in the “market,” praying that it will work, solving all our problems without creating new ones. (Though who knows; maybe Skynet will do a better job of biospheric restoration and recovery than we ever could.) We can’t afford to wait for the Next Big Thing to save us because it was a succession of heedlessly adopted Next Big Things that got us to where we are now. And as for living on the Moon or Mars, to quote New York, New York, if we can’t make it here, we can’t make it anywhere.
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
Let’s separate two issues:
1) Issues of population growth and over-plundering of Earth’s resources.
2) Whether capitalism and the current economic system is to blame.
On the first, it’s not “capitalism” that demands short-term prosperity now, at the cost of longer-term ecological damage, it’s people. People vote for it. That’s why no government is doing anything much to combat climate change, because people won’t vote for it. If a politician said “you get 50 gallons of gasoline for your car per year, no more” they’d get no votes at the next election.
Second, on population growth, it’s the most capitalist countries, the rich West, that have stabilised their populations, while it’s the least-capitalist countries where population growth is still rapid.
Similarly, it’s the populations of the rich, capitalist West who are now most keen on averting ecological damage (partly because they now have the wealth to care).
And there is nothing about ongoing economic growth and increasing prosperity that is incompatible with also looking after the planet. The one big issue is getting to sustainable energy. If we had that, we could then have ongoing technological innovation and ongoing rises in prosperity without any need to plunder unsustainable resources. And history shows that capitalism as a large part of the engine for technological development is the best way of doing this that we know of.
Speaking of peeves, even if somehow we managed to beam a message to another technological planet, the conversation would probably go more or less like this:
Earthling: Is anyone out there?
(300 years later) Alien: You rang?
Earthling: Um, what?
(300 years later) Alien: uh, what what?
Etc.
Hahahahahaha
@Coel,
You do realize this post is in response to Russia attempting to boost its population by forcing women to carry pregnancies to term? And that they are doing this because they believe there’s an economic link between population demographics and economic growth? I haven’t pulled the idea out of my ass. It’s their stated objective. Most economists believe population growth is essential to economic stability. It’s the cornerstone of my country — Canada’s — economy. It’s why there are countless thinkpieces all over the internet urging the US to jack up immigration rates to boost its (still growing, but slowly) population. Population demographic shift is primarily what caused Japan’s economic Lost Decades, if you ask pretty much any economist. And population demographic shifts are playing a huge role in China’s economic unravelling.
Whatever your personal peeves are about my jibe about capitalism (that it tends to siphon money upwards to the elites, creating an economic vacuum that requires the labour force to continually extract new resources from the bottom — which, again, is a commonplace view), they aren’t landing against my central point that economically-minded political leaders ought not to continually bank their nations’ prosperity on a growing labour force, especially in the current global climate of overpopulation, climate change, and AI labour disruption. You got a problem with that, take it up with them.
I always thought it was amazing how Trump was not booed off the stage for outsourcing the production of so much of his tatty trash while claiming he was going to reverse similar decisions by other manufacturers (like Harley Davidson) to follow the same path of self-interest and cheap labour he was decrying in others.
But we don’t have that. Again, we can’t wait for some pie-in-the-sky solution (which has ben “just twenty or thitdy years away” for as long as I can remember. And cheap energy won’t solve the issues of material rarity and the destruction involved in their extraction. Somebody loses. Who decides that? The movers and shakers or the potential victims? Whether it’s other species, or other human communities, the toxins and habitat destruction will occur even if we have unlimited energy. It’s what that energy is being used for that is a big part of the problem.
@Pliny #8,
It never ceases to amaze me how fast it’s developing. Take Artifical General Intelligence (AGI), the shorthand term for superhuman artificial intelligence. (Per Wikipedia: “an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable tasks,” or a computer that “could learn to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform.”)
Not long ago experts were saying AGI may never be achievable.
Then a few years ago many were saying it could be merely decades away.
Then last year they were saying it’s maybe just a few years away.
Then Reuters, just now reports: Did OpenAI achieve AGI last week? Sources say a top secret program called “Q-Star” made a discovery “that could threaten humanity” the night before their non-profit ethics-focused board fired their profit-focused aspiring-tech-mogul CEO.
Oopsie.
https://archive.is/5pPZx
@Artymorty:
No, I confess I had not realised that, since I read it on this thread, not in its original context. So apologies if I misconstrued the intent.
I agree that many people do argue this, yes. I’ve never been that convinced. It seems a fixation with GDP (yes that is increased by immigration) rather than the surely-more-important GDP-per-capita (which is not increased by immigration, and least I’ve never seen convincing evidence that it is).
I am happy to agree with you on that point. We shouldn’t see population growth as a good thing in its own right. For some reason it is trendy for “elites” to argue that immigration is a good thing. (The evidence is that it is indeed good for the immigrants; for the host country it is either roughly neutral or disadvantageous, depending on the immigrant population.)
Actually, I think the reason people argue this is precisely that point that immigration is good for the immigrants (who tend to be poor and non-white), and the dominant elite thought these days seeks whatever is good for such people. From there, they need to scheme up a justification for why this is good for the host country.
But lots of countries — Sweden, Denmark, Holland, others — are suffering badly and regretting their generosity, owing to a detrimental effect on the economy, higher crime rates, and a loss of social cohesion.
@Coel,
It’s off topic, but you make an interesting point about immigration and benevolence. In Canada, immigrants are not usually poor, and they’re admitted strictly on terms related directly to their suitability to the labour force.
Unlike Western European nations who are saddled with waves of migrants and asylum seekers of all kinds of education, language, and work skills, making their way from the Middle East, Northern Africa and elsewhere, and the US with its porous border with Mexico, Canada has the luxury of naturally strong border protection, flanked on both sides and above by vast oceans, with the US below. This means the topic of immigration is, to us, almost entirely separate from topics like asylum and refugee hosting, and largely uncoupled from cultural debates around xenophobia and racism.
Immigration today in Canada is strictly business, and it’s all about the labour force. Our refugee program aside (which is surprisingly small, given our goody-two-shoes image on the global stage), you can come to Canada from anywhere in the world, so long as you’re already middle-class or have enough qualifications to show you’ll be a productive, skilled labourer when you’re here.
Applicants to come to Canada are scored on a point system, between 0 and 1200 points, almost entirely based around their job qualifications, and what kinds of skills our economy is looking for at any given time. If we need computer coders, we’ll recalibrate the point allocation to give more points to people with computer science degrees; if we need mining specialists, you’ll get a huge points bonus if you’re skilled in that area. Then we set our threshold at however many points we need to get exactly the right number of immagrants into exactly the right areas into our economy. (Today the dial is set at 431. Very low. We’re letting lots of people in. This is causing problems for the housing market, and it’s starting to become a political issue.)
It’s a ruthlessly impersonal system. And it is based 100% purely around the idea, deeply ingrained in Canadians’ psyches, that this country depends on a growing population of skilled labourers to sustain itself. We must always have more productive labourers than retirees, and we must always draw upon immigrants with professional skills to keep the country growing and healthy.
In a country as resource-rich as Canada, that could in theory be sustained for a long time. But realistically, globally, it’s not working. And with AI very suddenly poised to render many of those new Canadian residents’ labour skills irrelevant, tensions at our nation’s borders are sure to get a little dicey.
@ Artymorty
Open AI is doing some amazing things, though big language models seem to have similar limitations to human cognition (not surprising). There are ways around that, however.
My own team has been working AI for 20+ years. Our work began with health related decision support but has expanded to include general purpose applications. We are testing general purpose self-learning and ethical control systems at this time. We will be releasing an AGI development platform as well as an intelligent medical record in 2024. Any system developed on the platform will be able to communicate with any other.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on This period of maximal […]
To divert into the AI stream of this thread for a moment, I went to a presentation the other night about predator control. In the NZ context this means possums, cats, rats, mice, mustelids (primarily), which are disastrous for New Zealand’s native ecology which evolved without those or anything that filled the same niche. The community group involved was massively excited about a new ‘intelligent’ trap that has become available. This has a camera within the trap that takes photos of the target, sends both photo and status comms back to base, and is self clearing and rearming. That cuts down hugely on the time people have to spend walking into remote areas to check and maintain traps.
The trap includes an AI that learns from both the photos it takes and also any corrective feedback from the human in the loop. Up until now the traps have only been deployed in areas where a couple of very at risk native species are not present to avoid the possibility of accidental kills. Very soon the use will be extended because the traps have demonstrated the ability to recognise target species so well there is real certainty it will arm/disarm itself to avoid ‘bycatch’.
In our local area humans setting cyanide or 1080 bait stations used to kill around 500 possums a year. Last year the new traps in the same area killed 2800. This is already having a visible impact on native bush regeneration. In five years we should start seeing a real uptick in survival of native birds, skinks, and invertebrates.
Interesting.
@Rob,
That is so fascinating. It’s just neverending, all the possibilities AI is opening up. It’s all so incredibly transformative, and so incredibly rapid. It’s like every single workplace just added their own personal Leonardo Da Vinci to the team, ready to blow everyone away with hyperadvanced ideas and skills. It’s not even been one year since the launch of ChatGPT and it’s already upended everything.
We’re already talking about “AI native” children, analagous to “digital natives” — children born in the internet era. Now there are kids coming up in the era of AI. But in this new case it’s terrifying because the kids are saying things along the lines that they can’t be bothered to learn any skills because AI can do everything better.
The kids these days, the digital natives, don’t know how to write cursive or play guitar because laptops made communication and music-making too easy.
Soon, in the age of the AI natives, they won’t have learned any complex skills at all, having decided there’s no value in investing the time when computers can do everything better.
Maybe that “digital” Leonardo we’ve all got at our fingertips will prevent another human Leonardo from ever happening again.
Well, those Eloi have to come from somewhere.
@YNNB
OMG! H.G. WELLS WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!!
Arty @20, yeah, it’s fascinating and scary in equal measure. Linking to a discussion on another thread, the thing that terrifies me about the coming generation of AI natives is that kids don’t have developed critical thinking skills, and AI and language models are very very convincing. I think we will see a transfer of political, economic, and social power to those who do understand AI, and/or are able to control and exploit its implementation. Just as with every other transformative technology in the past, but with deeper and longer lasting consequences.
WaM @ 5, I think the one you’re looking for is https://xkcd.com/2779/ (there’s an XKCD for everything).
Rob,
Clearly XKCD does funny better than me, but my peeve is that it’s unlikely that there are any advanced technological civilizations close enough to us to have a true conversation.