Optimism, Technology and Progress

Optimism, Technology and Progress

Last Sunday we recorded a Gillmor Gang and the topic turned to "progress" and the future. The show has not been released yet but due to the wonders of our streaming media world you can see the live recording as it happened here -

https://twitter.com/gillmorgang/status/1713619139628351897?s=61&t=G32nn4vUSL2wQvFzsbr_JQ

You will see me arguing that progress is measured by how much human work is replaced by automation. Freeing human time to do other things. Central to that idea is the belief that technological innovation will reduce the need for human labor. This idea of progress requires optimism of both the mind and the spirit. Not optimism in "technology" but in human ingenuity. And, after all, what is technology except for human ingenuity? The Gang had a lively discussion about it.

We were quite timely because 24 hours later Marc Andreessen released his mostly excellent Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It asks us all to:

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life."

and declares

We believe technology is a lever on the world - the way to make more with less.

This aligns with my own view and that of many innovators. The product of human ingenuity is growth, and growth drives human progress. AI is certainly one of the key inventions capable of accelerating progress - making more with less.

In another of this week's essays, we get an opposite point of view:

"Professor Hinton, who created waves when he quit his job at Google partly in order to sound the alarm over the existential threat AI poses to humanity, said: ""PaLM [Google's AI system] could actually explain why a joke was funny."

Another Damascene moment came when Hinton realised how good neural networks are at sharing information with each other compared to humans. Humans, who share information at the sentence level, could be thought of as swapping bytes of information between each other compared to AI, which can instantly share gigabytes.

"That was the moment I realised that we were history," concluded Hinton. "I'm pessimistic because pessimists are usually right." "

Pessimists are usually right is itself a sentence that only a pessimist could utter. I can't think of any period in human history where pessimism was right. From the Neanderthal age all the way to today, humans have been able to overcome limits to the development of the species while reducing individual working hours, improving health and longevity, globalizing access to knowledge, and so on. But Hinton is not alone in that view.

Sam Altman is interviewed on the same topic this week. Focusing on AI and job loss he is reported as follows:

Altman thinks job loss is an inevitable casualty of any "technological revolution." Every 100 to 150 years, Altman said at The Wall Street Journal Tech Live conference on Monday, half of people's jobs end up getting phased out.

"I'm not afraid of that at all," he said, as quoted by the paper. "In fact, I think that's good. I think that's the way of progress, and we'll find new and better jobs."

Altman is historically correct and logically correct also. Progress destroys jobs because it makes them unnecessary. If it is possible to improve teaching by introducing AI, that would be wonderful. The destruction of jobs is the very essence of progress.

The bit about finding new jobs has historically been true. But it would also be OK if technical innovation reached a point where AI and robots would even do the new jobs. Ultimately we will not need 7 billion or more people in "work" or paid labor.

That enables us to ask new questions, exciting questions. What motivates us to make effort? How do we use non-work or leisure time to make our lives more fulfilling? How does the wealth that is created by automation get used and distributed? How can we lift living standards for everybody? Is work and effort the same thing? Is free time the real currency of progress?

Altman poses and answers some of these:

Since framing job loss as some sort of greater good is basically his whole narrative. In the past, he's never sounded that upset about AI replacing the "median human," either.

Still, he did reiterate that "we are really going to have to do something about this transition" - though what that "something" will actually be remains unclear.

"It is not enough just to give people a universal basic income," Altman said. "People need to have agency, the ability to influence. We need to jointly be architects of the future."

When automated farming and land enclosures transformed agriculture in the time of the agricultural revolution, it led to the formation of cities and created the basis for an industrial revolution. The Spinning Jenny and the Steam Engine would have made no sense without free laborers leaving the land. AI will have a similar impact at greater scale, and faster. The human energy released for new endeavors will create things we cannot consider today.

Capitalism and the market are at the heart of Andreessen's Manifesto as mechanisms for fueling progress. So far that is historically true. Capitalism beats any system that has come before it. Because of this focus on capitalism and the market, Andreessen has no narrative about the distribution of abundance or wealth. He is silent on ownership other than to confirm, through the silence, that he sees no need to discuss it. The implication is that wealth flows to a few private hands, progress does not serve humanity as a whole except for the removal of drudgery, and abundance stays highly centralized in the hands of elites. He may not believe this, but there is no evidence he does not.

However, at some point, the wealth created by autonomous agents will suggest the need to challenge its concentration in a few hands. Altman has universal basic income as a partial answer to this. But most likely, we will need a social tax on automated wealth, ensuring that society benefits from humanity's gains and the resulting abundance.

In his wonderful novel, For Us the Living, written in 1939, Robert Heinlein called this a "Heritage" payment. That is a payment due to every human in order to enable all humans to benefit from the sum of all human progress.

The Heritage Check system grants every member of society a guaranteed minimum income - individuals may choose to work, but are not obligated to. Those who choose to work enjoy a remarkably short workday and pleasantly high wages. The result is a true leisure society - most people indulge themselves in artistic or artisanal pursuits.

Source: https://payingformyjd.wordpress.com

Altman is closest to asking and answering this question because he is closest to making jobs obsolete and seems to have an awareness of society as a real thing. (I always said he was smart.)

To quote Oscar Wilde:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.

Essays of the Week