Disclaimer Many of my essays are quite old. They were, in effect, written by a person who no longer exists in that my views, beliefs, and overall philosophy have grown and evolved over the years. Consequently, if I were to write on the same topics again, the resulting essays might differ significantly from their current versions. Rather than edit my essays to remain contemporary with my views, I have chosen to preserve them as a record of my past inclinations and writing style. Thank you for understanding.

Automated Workforce Scenarios

Introduction

Those of us who have been steeped in futurism our entire lives don't find the current AI debate very surprising. As long ago as 2001 (which was still pretty late for this overall discussion), I asked Ray Kurzweil a question. He was speaking at AAAI and I was in the audience, and I managed to get called during the Q&A minutes following his talk (I forget the topic), so I had the opportunity to aim a question directly at the big man himself, with an audience watching no less. I asked Kurzweil, "You (Ray), frequently theorize that as robots/AI/automation replace human jobs, humans will move into other, often not-previously-existing, lines of work. When cars replaced carriages, we lost all our horse trainers and coachmen, but we gained many more mechanics (engines required far more maintenance than mere wooden horse-drawn carriages), as well as a flourishing of brand new jobs like gas station attendants, paved roads, and the entire oil-refining industry, things of that nature. But we foresee technology reaching the point where there are no domains left for humans to escape into. So, Dr. Kurzweil, what happens when machines can do any human job and there's no labor left for humans to escape to?"

Scenario 1: Ever-evolving Workplace

Ray, for all his fame and all his accumulated wealth from his fame, and for his reasonable degree of prescience which I admit I do admire about him, blew my question off completely. He stuck to the script I just stated above, simply not acknowledging the situation I was describing (and which had been described prior to my posing the question); he just wouldn't take it seriously. Color me very disappointed with my one-and-only personal encounter with Kurzweil. I'll call his solution to the automation conundrum Scenario 1: the "Ever-evolving Workplace scenario".

Moving on from my encounter with Kurzweil, the following is what futurists have been theorizing about this issue for a generation now. Freed from the drudgery of sustenance-scrounging that humans have operated under since our dawn, full labor automation will set humans loose upon a Golden Age of unbridled expression and exploration. We will be become the philosopher-artists our conscious minds aspire to. What is the economic model, you ask? One proposal I recall from the 80s and 90s was that everyone would become a stock-owner in automated corporations and would live off the dividends. Easy peasy. That's what I always thought was the path forward because it was the one I was exposed to during those formative decades. I'll call that "Scenario 2":

Scenario 2: Dividend-Funded Retirement

Scenario 2 [the Dividend-Funded Retirement scenario]: In the fully-automated-work world, we will all live in quasi-retirement, living on dividends from our automated factory stock holdings, and spend postbiological eternity painting still-lifes of robotic fruit sitting in robotic bowls, and recreating Bohemian scenes of debating Wittgenstein with our cherished colleagues over glowing glasses of absinthe.

There are other paths though. Here are two others that have risen in my mind in recent years (I phrase it that way because they came from me, not from external readings, although I have no doubt others have had similar ideas) that feel more updated to the 2020s in which we find ourselves:

Scenario 3: Labor Multiplier

Scenario 3 [the Labor Multiplier scenario]: Instead of working shorter hours as more and more of our tasks get automated away, why aren't we all working the same number of hours as before, but getting 100 or 1000 person's worth of work out of each person? There are articles in the last year describing this: The software engineers at the AI companies, and a few other tech-savvy companies, describe how they are able to accomplish five tasks at once or how they can write three months of code in three hours. Fine, so why aren't we all basically doing the same thing as before (same number of hours sitting in the same office chair, or same number of hours standing in the same factory line, or same number of hours trudging in the same farm field) but managing a personal army of AIs and robots that turn every single one of us into 1000 pre-2020s worth of person labor? The salary structure can more or less be left alone, so survival in the world isn't particularly effected but everyone just gets more stuff done!

By this argument, we wouldn't expect to see tech companies laying everyone off though! That's what confuses me. Why replace human employees with AI and ditch the humans, instead of keeping all the employees your current have, but scaling your company's output up by 100X or 1000X as each employee becomes empowered to produce that much more output for the canonical workday's worth of labor they were already putting in? I don't understand that. Why don't Amazon and Facebook (and even UPS, which is doing the same thing) keep all their current staff but supercharge their corporate output as those employees become capable of doing tremendously more work than before? I honestly understand why we aren't seeing that pattern instead of the current pattern of layoffs and AI replacement.

Scenario 4: Everyone Becomes a CEO

Scenario 4 [the Everyone Becomes a CEO scenario]: This scenario is more concerning to me because it requires people to adopt a new set of skills -- and interests -- they may not be inclined for. What we see currently going on is the enablement of the few billionaire CEOs of the world to run their entire corporations single-handedly from their throne-room offices. Maybe Zuckerberg just doesn't need tens of thousands of employees to run Facebook anymore. Maybe he can fire everyone and run a host of AIs from his desk to produce the same billions of dollars of value. At a glance, that sounds treacherous and paints a picture of a world in which billions live in hopeless squalor while ten or twenty people run the entire world. But why shouldn't that scenario play out slightly differently. If Zuckerberg can run his entire company with AIs, shouldn't that mean every laid off employee can go create his or her own billion dollar company, and then CEO over their own army of robots? This is probably the excuse that defenders of the current situation try to paint: My laid off employees can go make their own companies with AI now, so we don't have to worry about them. But as I said, one obvious problem with this proposal is that it requires everyone to have that particular set of skills and interests now. You can't have a heterogenous workforce anymore: some CEOs, some HR managers, some accountants, some engineers, some baristas, some maintenance crew. Now the only job left in the entire world is owning and running your own company: being a "business bloke" in effect, whatever the hell that consists of. But not everyone necessarily wants to live their life that way, and not everyone even has that particular set of skills (schmoozing investors and wrangling business contracts -- or playing golf, whatever the fuck it is that CEOs actually do, I honestly don't know). So this scenario doesn't seem very feasible to me due to its hopeless homogenous labor characterization. Is it possible for the world to consists of 9 billion CEOs squirreled away in the CEO offices on the 100th floor of 9 billion skyscrapers hoarding over 9 billion piles of gold? Even if automation actually truly does enable that sort of world, it feels vaguely similar to scenario 2, which otherwise seems far more enjoyable. Instead of spending my entire day CEOing over my personal Fortune-500 company, I'd rather spend my entire day hiking and painting while dividends passively pile up in my bank account. Pass the absinthe please.

Scenario 5: Dystopian Oligarchy

And then there's scenario 5: Dystopian Oligarchy. We all know this one. I don't even need to describe it.

Conclusion

So, those are the five scenarios I see:

1. Ever-evolving Workplace (I've argued that this is infeasible as it ignores the reality of an era when the concept of "new human jobs" no longer applies)
2. Dividend-Funded Retirement
3. Labor Multiplier
4. Everyone Becomes a CEO
5. Dystopian Oligarchy

I would really like to hear what people think of this. If you prefer private feedback, you can email me at kwiley@keithwiley.com. Alternatively, the following form and comment section is available.