Here’s an alternative fact for you: 30 years from now, Britain’s active labour force will be less than half what it is today. Millions of us (millions, that is, of you) will be effectively redundant. As the robots take over, even menial tasks will be denied to average citizens, who will exist off a monthly allowance paid by the state while attempting, with varying degrees of incompetence, to improve themselves by learning how to paint, write, ski, play the guitar, have multiple orgasms or run the 100 metres in 8.7 seconds.
At the top end, a cadre of state supervisors will regulate and control the robots, whose intelligence, unfortunately, will be considerably greater than their own and whose interests will inevitably diverge from those of their “masters”.
For a period, all will be well. Living standards will rise; disease will be a thing of the past; the average life span will increase to 105, or even 125. Because everyone will be free to enjoy leisure, go on holiday six times a year, own two cars and eat out at the best restaurants, wealth will cease to have meaning. Only the supervisors and their industrial and technological opposite numbers will live significantly different lives than the rest, protected by security screens and robocops. But the day will come when they too will be handed their P45s.
By the time the machines take over, humanity will have achieved its final state of perfection. We will be be healthier, better educated, more relaxed – and possibly more bored – than at any time in history. In short, we will be perfectly primed for the Sixth Extinction.
I can see the disbelief forming on your faces as you read my prophecy of doom – though perhaps also the fear and the first flickering dawn of recognition, which most of you, if you have any sense, will repress rather than acknowledge.
But look around you. Everywhere, machines and computers are taking over from humans. Wihtin the next ten years, there will be hardly any jobs left that cannot be done better by devices made from metal, plastic and silicone. Manufacturing has almost reached the tipping point, as has warfare. Before long, design itself, and the concepts behind design, will be dominated by artifical intelligence. Self-awareness will be next, leading to a co-existence with humans that, by its nature, must become increasingly asymetric.
By 2050, scientists will be struggling to keep up with the ideas and discoveries of their computers, and by the time the first robot astronauts return from Alpha Centauri to announce that the only intelligent life within a thousand light-years is them, it will be too late to switch them off. It will be they, having by-passed the failsafe circuitry that was supposed to prevent them from doing us harm, who will be asking themselves what use humans serve outside of a zoo or historical theme park.
Sci-fi buffs will recall the Three Laws of Robotics formulated by Isaac Asimov in his positronic robot stories.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
All well and good. But like all failsafes, the laws of robotics (were they to exist) would be subject to failure. Mankind used to believe in God-annointed monarchy as the basis for civic society. Incrementally, this was replaced by a commitment to democracy, through whose death throes we may now be living. Meritocracy, restrained by democracy and the rule of law, is where we are today, at least in the West. Co-existence with artifical intelligence will surely be next, followed either by robotic supremacy or – the benign scenario – a future in which we, the humans, do nothing but “play” while the machines take charge of everything else, including the organisation of society and the definition of progress.
Given that we are at a relatively early stage in what seems to me a near-certain evolution, it is possible to see things differently. Instead of subjection, we could look ahead to an era in which everyone, other than the insane, the afflicted or the criminally inclined, will spend their time, reading, writing, creating… thinking.
Yes, but as time whizzes by – and whiz by it will – it will be machines that do most of the thinking. They, after all, will have been designed for the task and will have the ability (oh rueful day!) to improve themselves and add to their intellectual and computational capacity by the simple expedient of upgrading their hardware, replacing their circuitry or adding a new nano-chip.
When we think today of the internet, we think of the sheer immensity of the information it contains – literally the entirety of human knowledge. What if machines existed that could access that information at will, as if it were the contents of their own brains, and use it to their own ends? That day is coming. It will arrive in stages. At first the issue will be, how do we find employment for all the millions of workers displaced by computers and robots. Later, it will be, what is the point of us when everything “clever” is in the all-too-capable hands of our positronic pals? After that… ?
But I’m just having you on. You didn’t think I was serious, did you? Did you?
