Artificial Intelligence should make us wax and wane on how it will impact humanity as a whole. Elon Musk has called for a halt to AI advancement while more recently rolling out his new AI robots, Optimus. This captures well the uncertainty implied in its development. The promise is huge, but I wonder what happens to humans whose jobs evaporate. In this sense, education comes powerfully to the forefront. What jobs require human talent if AI advances in mass? Data analysts’ jobs will erode quickly. More generally, all jobs that deal with comparative data will likely disappear. There are many white collar jobs: lawyers, research scientists, computer coders, scholars, etc. Why bother with scholars at all? Scholars synthesize data to provide new insights, but this goes at a human rate. Coders write and check code, but an AI will do this way more rapidly. How many coders will it take to keep an eye on AI if corporations utilize AI instead of humans to write code? Humans take years to read and digest the literature to make them a scholar on a subject. An AI can read, digest, and produce new material, in an instant. If an AI lawyer could cover every piece of case-law, why would I want a human lawyer? If Musk’s Optimus can work in a labor position, why do I need laborers? What do humans do if all these jobs no longer require humans to fill them?
The answers to these questions will be born from our take on human nature generally. More specifically, what happens when humans have an abundance of time on their hands? To quote the Puritans, “idle hands are the devil’s playground.” We need not agree with this sentiment completely, but it focuses rightly on a coming crisis. To cite another cynic of our time, Yuval Harari, humans will become “useless eaters.” While my view of human dignity precludes thinking of humans in these terms, we can’t miss Harari’s point. What do humans do when they are no longer needed to work? The theological insight from the book of Genesis—that God created humankind to work—also brings forward the question about human happiness. If humans are inherently designed to find satisfaction in the work of their hands, what happens when humans no longer need to work?
Two crises look to be on the horizon: a crime crisis and an existential crisis. As we know from historical demographic data, as unemployment goes up so does crime. While the research on the connection between job-loss and crime is varied, there is sizable volume demonstrating the connection. Intuitively, it is obvious that crime should go up as job-losses happen. If income is lost and resources are sparse but needs remain, what is the solution? Either we produce what we need, or we plunder what we need. Without a job, we cannot produce so that leaves plunder. There is another answer that Marxists would offer: i.e., UBI, or universal basic income. UBI destroys social mobility, and it puts a feature into society that enables idleness to endure. Is it an instinct to improve our own lives and the lives of our children? UBI cannot provide a path to improve anyone lives except for those administering UBI, which is typically government and the elites at the top of the financial social strata. In short, universal basic income codifies a caste system where mechanics for social mobility are eroded. An idle society with no opportunity to “change their stars” commends “plundering” as a way out. The father or mother, telling themselves that their kids and their kids are worth it, will view UBI as a systemic evil to be overcome so that no matter how heinous the plundering might be, it will be justifiable, and they will sleep well at night.
If AI takes over jobs, and there is no UBI, what do humans do? Will corporations pay lots of humans with benefits and the whole nine yards when they can simply have AI and robots do the same job with potentially better results, and way cheaper? There is one situation that sound favorable; if property ownership is vast and property-owners can go back to farming and bartering, there is a path forward for society. As an aside, I do not believe UBI to be a solution, just to make it clear—as I hope I did in the former paragraph. Without property ownership and the will to return to an earlier way of life, however, what will humans do without jobs?
This is not a small problem, and it is a new problem. There has never been a time in human history when humans were not needed for the productivity of society. To be fair, AI is nothing more than human intelligence magnified with massive processing power—I’ve written on this extensively in early posts. Because it is new, how it will play out is unknown and solutions are not available. We might cite Star Trek, the Next Generation, where the technological advancements allowed humanity’s basic needs for food, water, and shelter to be eliminated, and with this, the old-economic currencies were unneeded. While such utopianism is conceivable, it doesn’t deal with the problem of limited resources. Scarcity is the center of all human envy. Population growth mixed with limited energy mixed with scarcity leads to the conclusion that there will be those who have and those who have not. If resources are extractable from other planets, we might resolve the problem of scarcity; it still seems doubtful. We don’t know, at this point, the impact of introducing new mass or new elements into Earth to even know if such is viable. Plundering, then, is a reasonable expectation for those who are under the full weight of scarcity.
The existential crisis deserves more space, but let me qualify the nature of the crisis here. A long-standing philosophical question is “what is the good life?” What brings human happiness? The American project has been outed as a failure with its adage, “pursuing what you want is the attainment of happiness.” What we should desire is central to the quest for happiness. If doing as one wants led to happiness, Americans should be joyful to astronomical levels, but what we find is a populace with greater stress than other countries and a culture fixed around grievance and envy. We suggest that the belief that the pursuit of money leads to happiness is a toxic feature too of the American myth. Satisfying work, a work/life balance, the centrality of a cause or causes bigger than ourselves, and the ongoing moral improvement of our souls, seems like a start to finding happiness, at least as this theologian sees it.
Dr. Scalise