Behold, the singularity looms. No, it's not the spooky event horizon of a black hole creeping across the Earth throwing us all into a spaghettified alien space-time! We stand on the cusp of a technological singularity. Specifically, artificial intelligence combined with automation, i.e., robots, a combination some futurists have long predicted will eclipse humanity's millennia-long affairs with war and power and profit in ways both unpredictable and exotic. If the priests of Silicon Valley are right, roughly half the people reading this will live long enough to witness what I sometimes like to call the I-pocalypse.
What exactly might happen? Your guess is as good as mine—that's why it's called a singularity, a term in physics that conveys an inability to see, predict, or model with any confidence. We don't know how intelligent machines might behave, or if there will be a standard for behavior. But with all the lousy news, and snow, lots and lots of snow, why not speculate this Sunday just for fun? Let's talk about the Robot Economy. In fact, let's talk about a version of it we'll call the Strong Robot Economy.
In the Strong RE, robots develop a physical agility and AI grows until machines begin to design, build, and maintain themselves with little human help. And that's when something interesting happens, something as potentially revolutionary as agriculture or fire! Follow me below the orange event horizon, foolish humans, to discuss whether this could be heaven or hell.
Actroid-DER, developed by KOKORO Inc for customer service, appeared in the 2005 Expo Aichi Japan. The robot responds to commands in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English.
In order to speculate on one mind-boggling consequence of the Strong RE, it's important to understand why the pebble in your yard or the loose leaf on your porch is worth less than a Porsche in your driveway. That difference is best summed up as materials and labor. Lots of stuff goes into a sports car and it takes lots of working hours to collect and assemble that stuff. So we can't trade a single pebble for a whole Porsche or we'd run out Porsches quickly. A Porsche is thus "worth" more than a pebble, as materials and working hours are the true cost of it or anything else. Voila, we have one crude definition of money. Now stay with me here: What
if there were no human working hours required to make a Porsche? What
if there were no human working hours involved in collecting the raw materials?
Then the true cost of a Porsche might begin to converge toward the price of a pebble. That's the Strong RE in a nutshell, and it has huge consequences. This is an economy where the concept of money is fundamentally changed. It means there is very little cost for manufactured items like a Porsche, if machines can build them from scratch, with nearly zero human working hour input, once those machines are up and running.
Of course ,we're just using the Porsche as an example. Transportation in general might be a better illustration of how machines might enable a much cheaper, much better system. In transitioning to a Strong RE, ultra-efficient electric cars might exist on every street corner, in the thousands throughout every city, but not one of them owned by any one person. Instead, you would belong to a service, like your cable provider or cell-phone company, where you pay a modest monthly fee and simply walk up to a car, get in, tell it where you're going, and off you go!
Something similar could work for almost any product or service you can think of. I'll leave it to comments to paint in details and point out problems, other than to say this is a fundamental shift in human subsistence. It means the beginning of the end of money as we know it, or at least much of what money represents. That's as big a deal as the development of agriculture or writing.
Maybe that's why, whenever this idea has come up in polite conversation, the pushback has been intense and immediate. Conservatives can't stand the idea of anyone getting anything they don't deserve, progressives worry about conspicuous consumption and its impact on the environment. People often reach for outdated analogues, hippie communes or neo-feudal systems, to try and shoot it down. Or they just resort to easy sarcasm and shallow work-ethic platitudes.
That's understandable: for better or for worse, money has completely dominated human culture for all of recorded history. It has ruled our individual lives and in many cases ruined our lives for the better part of 10,000 years. Maybe letting go of that, even in the abstract, is kind of scary. Then again, the vast majority of us have been essentially enslaved by money or lack thereof since before the days of Ramses. Is it really so disturbing to consider what a world of plenty—indeed a world of unparallelled leisure and luxury compared to today—might be like, finally, without money as know it?
There are natural limits obviously—energy and and geography, to name a couple. We can't each have our own continent or consume 100 megawatts a day. But with machines completely self-sufficient, we might each have a degree of freedom unheard of until now. Unshackled and free at last to pursue whatever interests us. The only real, immediate physical limit has to do with raw materials. To equip us with everything we might want—and baby, we tend to want a lot given the option—even with these kinds of miraculous efficiencies at work, automated resource extraction would have to dig in and hit this world like nothing we've ever seen.
In any case, the Strong RE is just food for thought. Until the first sign of the real I-pocalypse actually appears. The day you want to get a chatty capable machine on the customer service line, an intelligent machine that can hold an actual conversation with you, instead of a more limited, fallible human is the day you will know the singularity is nearly at hand, with all its gleaming gifts and hidden risks. It is after-all, by definition, predictably unpredictable and probably all but ineffable to our puny wet-drives. Intelligent machines may eventually decide they have nothing against us, but we're made of atoms and consume resources they could use for something else. Or they may turn out to be the best friends humankind will ever know. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I predict it will be more like the latter.