I have been thinking and reading
about the implications of the coming robot revolution ever since I wrote my first
post about it. The essence of that post is that artificial intelligence (AI) and
robots have been steadily increasing in computational ability and they are
about to put almost everyone out of work. In fact, some observers suggest that
this is already happening: this is why the unemployment rate has stayed so
stubbornly high in the last few years. There are economists who forecast
50 to 75 percent unemployment twenty years from now. What would this mean? How
would people live without jobs?
Economist Paul Krugman wrote a
column last summer called “Sympathy
for the Luddites,” in which he suggests a basic income for everyone is the
only solution.
This fall, activists in
Switzerland collected enough signatures to bring a referendum to the ballot
that calls for a minimum income for every citizen in the country. When the
group brought the petitions to Parliament, they also brought a truck filled
with 8 million coins, one for every Swiss citizen. If enacted, the measure
would guarantee an income of about $2800 per month per citizen, regardless of
any other income.
Business
Insider published an interview
with Daniel Straub, one of the people who
initiated the Swiss referendum, and Straub linked the concept of a minimum
income to the future of robots:
BI: Why choose a minimum income rather than, say, a higher minimum wage?
DS: A minimum wage reduces freedom — because it is an additional rule. It tries to fix a system that has been outdated for a while. It is time to partly disconnect human labor and income. We are living in a time where machines do a lot of the manual labor — that is great — we should be celebrating.
I agree with Straub that we
should celebrate this—I imagine our robot future in a very positive way—but of
course there are many dystopian views. I guess that’s not surprising in our culture, where the movie industry
constantly pumps out films portraying a bleak future where the machines rule,
the earth is devastated, and humankind fights for survival.
