BY ALEX STORY
So, Trump brought the big boys to town.
More than $15 trillion sat around the table for the White House Artificial Intelligence summit, represented by twenty-one of the world’s biggest companies at the end of September.
Robotics, artificial intelligence and the economic impact of both were on the agenda.
It led, Trump said, to the signing of a morally binding document, “almost like a constitution”. It was backed, he added, by “the biggest people in the world”.
One of these, at 6’2″, was Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who stood next to him in the Rose Garden.
When asked, Mr Musk talked about the future, that place he has done so much to bring forward for us to witness.
The universal basic income was broached, but “it won’t be the universal basic income, it will be universal high income”, he said reassuringly.
“There will be no shortage of goods and services. Everyone will be able to have whatever goods and services they want”, he prophesied.
“We won’t have poverty… money itself will eventually become less important because the cost of producing things will approach zero,” he continued, sounding like a politician on the campaign trail.
The universal basic income topic, though, has been a recurring theme for Elon, the seeds of which were planted in his mind after an argument with Larry Page in 2015 on the nefarious potential of Artificial Intelligence on society.
Larry Page, then Google CEO, branded him a “specist” – the West Coast equivalent to populist.
Elon’s sin, it seemed, was that he cared more for human beings and human consciousness than for digital beings.
Nothing more, Page thought, than “emotional nonsense”.
Though they rarely spoke after that, the idea of a universal income germinated.
A few years later, at the AI Day 1 event in August 2021 in Palo Alto, in which Musk showcased advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous driving, he said that if a general robot could be produced to scale it would “supercharge the economy”.
In that case, “we may want to institute universal basic income”. Working, he mused, “would become a choice.”
More recently, during an interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, the Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, he said, “with robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all”.
There would be a universal high income. There will be no more poverty. Money, Musk added, would no longer matter by 2036. Heaven on earth would be within touching distance.
Abundance for all implies the disappearance of the division of labour.
“You can’t have both. You can’t have work that has to be done and amazing abundance for all”.
Thus, in painting the canvas of the future, Musk sketched over to Marx‘s earlier thoughts.
In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, the German philosopher wrote about the “higher phase of communist society” in which “the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour” would become obsolete.
Money, too, Marx thought, would cease to be meaningful.
It would lead, Marx believed, to a classless, stateless and moneyless global order.
In both scenarios, abundance would be provided and man would live in a state of contentment, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
In Engels and Marx’s view, the final stage of communism, the administration of things, would be fuelled by the mystical power of “free association”, after having gone through the benign dictatorship of the fighting proletariat, better known as the intelligentsia.
In Musk’s opinion, the mythical “free association” assumed by Marx and Engels would be replaced by actual and developing artificial and benign intelligence, controlled by half a dozen enlightened individuals and their (AI) agents.
“‘Twas ever thus,” joked Elon when Zanny Minton Beddoes pointed to the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of “six or seven people”.
From that orbital ivory space station’s rarefied point of view, the surface of the earth seems flat.
From that distance, it is possible to imagine that the civilisational and permanent dislocation of habits would be steeled by universal income.
But, closer to the ground, where societal topography becomes more rugged, life is not quite that simple.
As James C. Scott reminds us in Seeing Like a State: “it has happened that so many of the 20th century’s political tragedies have flown the banner of progress, emancipation and reform”, adding that the designs for life and production, by highfalutins, “tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative and morale of their intended beneficiaries.”
If implemented in full, the universal income feels like one of those progressive, emancipatory changes that would rob us of meaning.
However, the removal of life’s hitherto unavoidable requirements has been tried before and is not quite as foreign as Musk seems to think.
Indeed, on a micro level, the universal basic income was tested in a few countries, such as Canada, Finland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States from the mid-1970s onwards.
The results were unsurprisingly similar.
Labour supply shrank and motivation levels dropped.
While the costs of such programmes were found to be prohibitive when implemented, these would be nullified by quasi-infinite productivity gains in robotics and AI.
However, dependence would increase absolutely.
On a macro level, in Western societies, two things strike the reader.
A universal basic income of sorts and abundance are both current realities, not wishful utopias.
Firstly, in France, the United Kingdom and Germany only between 32% to 42% of the population produces wealth in the “pure” private sector and are completely independent of state payrolls and government procurement contracts.
The rest depend mostly on the state for their livelihood.
So much so, in fact, that the welfare bill far exceeds the income tax receipts in all three countries.
But, crucially, societal harmony does not follow.
Quite the contrary.
Further, implementing the universal wage globally would mean the de facto eradication of all borders that separate nations, cultures and languages, all in the name of future abundance.
Secondly, we already live in the era of abundance.
Two examples will illustrate.
The World Health Organisation says that adult obesity has doubled since 1990.
At around the time when Elon Musk presages the disappearance of money, the World Obesity Federation projects that by 2035 more than half the world could be either overweight or obese if current trends continue.
While, at the other end of the scale, natural famines have all but disappeared, deaths from which have fallen by more than 95% in the last 50 years to below 300,000 in the ten years to today.
However, removing meaning and incentives by forcing the introduction of the universal wage, in the name of abundance, would turn freedom into a chimera.
It would be slavery’s final victory over freedom, which is why Musk said: “AI definitely gives me nightmares”.
Foreshadowing the rise of Artificial Intelligence, and the deskilling that would accompany it, in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell wrote that the “ultimate goal of mechanical progress is a world in which everything is done by machinery, and human effort is eliminated”.
Leisure would mean doing nothing, he added.
And idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
As King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.