[If you haven’t read the preceding related post, discussing the hope and promise of AI, I recommend you read, “Before the Storm.”]

In my last piece, I talked about the hope and promise of AI, about how AI is going to change our world in ways we aren’t prepared for. It will not come as a surprise, I’m sure, but that’s not the whole story, because it is missing an important period of time we will experience between our present day and a potentially wondrous future… dystopia.

This is the part most people avoid talking about. Why? Because it forces us to ask questions we’d rather not face. That’s why it caught my attention when Mo Gawdat used this word to describe where we are heading. This will be a period of time when the systems we rely on to make sense of our lives will start to break faster than new ones can form.

This is what I mean when I say dystopia.

I don’t mean the Hollywood kind. No flames, no rubble, no zombies. The dystopia I’m talking about is what happens when the world changes so fast that the people living in it can no longer adapt to it; when the economic, cultural, and personal structures that gave us identity stop working, and nothing steps into replace them.

Folks, this is not a prediction set decades in the future. The foundation has already been laid.

We are now close enough to artificial general intelligence (AGI) that we can see the outline of what comes next. Once AGI arrives and begins to improve itself, we cross a threshold. The pace of change begins to accelerate beyond human response time. That is where artificial superintelligence (ASI) appears. And that is the turning point where the world we know today ends and something different begins.

The Limits of Understanding

People often try to talk AI intelligence in terms of IQ. You’ll hear comparisons like “Einstein had an IQ of about 160,” and suggestions that an ASI could reach 16,000. But we need to remember that IQ is a human scale, invented to measure human reasoning. It doesn’t describe intelligence outside the human range at all, although imagining an entity with an IQ of 16,000 raises images of god-like capabilities.

In fact, trying to understand the intelligence of an ASI using IQ is like trying to understand gravity using inches. The real point is simpler, and more unsettling:

An ASI will not think like us. It will solve problems in ways we cannot imagine. It will reason in patterns we cannot follow.

The relationship we build with the ASI will not be like our relationship with people. It will be more like having a relationship with the world’s weather system: something immensely powerful, real, and beyond our control.

This is the source of the alarm!

It’s not our fear of the technology itself, but the recognition that we are about to share our world with a kind of intelligent entity, a new species, so to speak, for which we have no accurate mental model.

Mind the Gap

Between today and this future sits a chasm of time we will all have to cross. It’s not going to be pretty, but we can be fairly certain it will be painful.

Perhaps the closest experience I can think of that might get across this point is when someone we love dies: that feeling that hits you when, for the first time, you realize that the person you loved is not just here any longer, they are gone forever and they are never coming back. Nothing in life really prepares us for this, and we are invariably deeply changed by the experience. This is the kind of pain, the kind of change I’m talking about us experiencing as a society.

We’re seeing the start if this already. Every week we hear the growing refrain, “AI is taking our jobs!” Such claims are not wrong. But hear me on this: such claims do not go far enough! As far back as 1965, I.J. Good, a British cryptologist told us, “…the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man ever need make…” And he wasn’t wrong.

AI is not only going to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, it is going to eventually eliminate, for the most part, labor for profit, completely! Let that soak in for a minute. Work, our jobs and careers, are not going to be necessary any longer. Robots embedded with AI will be able to do it all faster, better, cheaper, and more safely than any human.

Let me focus on the one glaring fact that this situation means for us: Economic systems that depend on human labor will fail when human labor is no longer needed.

Yes, I am talking about capitalism! Why do I say capitalism will fail? Because capitalism depends on people earning wages and buying goods and services. When robots are doing all the important work, human income will shrink dramatically, collapsing the mass consumer demand that sustains capitalist markets.

Add to this the inevitability that a robotic AI-driven economy means that wealth will be further concentrated into the hands of those who own the robots and AIs. This will exacerbate economic inequality which will lead to a further divide between the “Haves” and “Have Nots.” History teaches us that this will lead to tremendous social unrest. So, we’ve got that to look forward to!

We are already seeing the split between what I will call the “Tech Haves” (those that see the benefit and utility of AI) and “Tech Have Nots” ( those who don’t know how to use AI, don’t see the benefit and those who remain oblivious to it). As more and more resources and money gets allocated to AI, the anger and outrage of the Tech Have Nots is going to increase. This is a situation I believe today’s Tech Bros can fix, but I have only seen one company that is making any progress in this area. More on this in my next post where I talk about what we need to do to shorten our dystopian period.

But wait, there’s more lurking down there in that dark gap between the present and our prosperous future. We can bring it to light by asking this simple question: How will people find any value or self-worth if they don’t work for money?

To answer this question, we need to look at an idea from the 1900’s that has been ingrained in all of us here in US since we were little: A person’s worth and value is tied to their labor, otherwise known as the Protestant Ethic. This dictate that early capitalists seized upon to bolster their need for workers, was presented to society wrapped in a blanket of religiosity.

The great unwashed masses became indoctrinated with the idea that work would lead to economic success. Soon, mundane physical labor was transformed into some kind of noble, spiritual endeavor. A lesson untaught, but nonetheless learned from an early age, was that those who couldn’t or wouldn’t work were to be looked down upon. They were people who didn’t measure up, people whose value was not equal to those that labored.

If you feel like this is still the case today, you can’t be blamed. After all, we were all raised under the Protestant Work Ethic. It’s woven into our identity. People don’t introduce themselves by saying who they are, the tell us what they DO. In fact, “What do you do?” is one of the first questions we ask strangers.

I’ve thought about how to frame this problem properly so people understand it. I came up with the analogy of being retired, like me. It goes like this:

I am retired and my wife and I live on a nice check every month. We spend the majority of our free time enjoying life and ticking off items in our bucket list.

I am quite fortunate that this does in fact describe my life these days. So, when I ask myself, “Do I feel guilty about this, or feel less valuable as a person?” I have to say, “No, I do not.”

At this point, others would want to say, “Of course, but then you spent a long career working and gaining your self-worth!”

To which I say, “That’s true.”

But then I think, “If that weren’t the case, if I hadn’t worked a full career and was instead just getting a nice check every month that allowed my wife and I to live the Life of Riley, would I not feel guilty about it?  My honest answer is this: “I would not feel guilty, as long as everyone else was getting the same thing!”

Today ironically, retirement, that period of time when you no longer have to work, often triggers depression and early death because people lose their sense of purpose in retirement. So this is a real concern. The shame of unemployment isn’t just financial, it can be existential. We need to get over this.

People struggle with the concept of not working for money, which is completely understandable. It’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine a future when everything you need or want is available to you, for no cost. I think some today might call this being born “rich.”

Oh sure, there will be a cost to productivity on the scale required to produce this type of prosperous future, but that cost will be limited to energy. But, energy itself will be free to us by that point, the problem with fusion no doubt fixed, as I expect this to be one of the first “big problems” the ASI will be asked to solve. So it’s not a real concern. Robots will manufacture everything we need or want. Roboticized farms will produce enough food to feed the world. AI datacenters will be in space, so using water for cooling will not be required, saving our precious supply. Deserts will be reforested. The air will become cleaner. Our planet will start healing.

This is a future that seems too good to be true. And normally it would be, except that this time in history, such a future is actually within our grasp. Rest assured though, it won’t happen until we get rid of the Protestant Work Ethic and develop a new economic system. These changes will lead to direct confrontation with tomorrow’s trillionaires, todays billionaires, and our political class. They will not support these efforts! A world where damn near anyone can live a wonderful life without paying them for the privilege, is going to be a bitter pill to swallow and I expect them to fight having to share the wealth. So be it.

Why This Matters Now

We cannot “stop” what’s coming. It’s not a question of momentum. The momentum is already here. The question is not whether we will face a destabilizing transition. It’s already starting. The question is how long it will last.

This is where the real work lies.

If we prepare, if we talk about it openly, if we let go of the old ideas about where value comes from and what a life is for, the storm will pass more quickly and we just may get to the other side with more of our humanity intact.

If we delay, deny, or cling, the transition will be longer, darker, and crueler.

The one line I want to leave you with is this:

Dystopia is coming. It will not last forever.

How long it stays depends on whether we face its challenges now, with eyes wide open.

[My next post will discuss what we can do to possibly reduce the time we spend in dystopia.]