back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

I was having a conversation with My Lovely Wife on the way to work recently. We were talking about work and progress and I mentioned the Coming Singularity. She told me she knew not of what I spoke. Below is the note I sent to her to explain what I was talking about.

When hipster geeks (1) like me talk about The Singularity what we mean is this.

There comes a point where the current rules, guides, methods etc. don’t apply anymore and predicting how people should behave and what they will do becomes very difficult. The only answer to a the question “What does the Future look like?” is a shrug of the shoulders.

There are a couple of potential Singularities out there. The most famous are around the creation or evolution of strong-form Artificial Intelligence and / or the ability to transfer human minds into computers and thence into robot bodies or spaceships. Some people get very excited about these. Some are actively planning for them. (2)

The one I’m thinking of is a bit more mundane and based in economics. Most of what follows doesn’t require any new technology, it just requires existing technology to be evenly distributed around the world and for the price to come down a bit. For the bits that do require new technology I believe it’s all already under development.

There are three trends, which have been running over different periods of time that I think intersect in some way in the near future. Probably our lifetimes, certainly the lifetimes of our children.

Firstly, the long running trend of technology affecting labour. Technology takes skills and places them in machines, automates and speeds up repetitious tasks and enhances human abilities by giving us more strength or speed or data processing capability. This makes human labour more productive. It increases our material wealth and reduces the amount of time we have to spend working, either physically hard or at al. In the process, as a necessary by-product, it eliminates labour. Generally, lower-skilled labour. This has been going on for the last 250 years. So far we’ve generally found something useful for the displaced labour to do, usually involving more skilled, more valuable work, but not always. This trend continues. We’ll see 3-D printers making bespoke items for mass consumption soon.

Secondly, over the last 40 years of so the high labour-cost West has been trading more openly with the lower labour-cost rest of the world. We’ve been transferring skills, capital and technology to them, they’ve been exporting cheap manufactured goods to us, we’ve all been getting richer. Jobs have shifted from Europe and America to Asia and Latin America and will shift again in turn to Africa, until everyone who wants to be as rich as us is.  As a consequence labour rates in the West have been held down and entrepreneurs have had a choice when they want to increase productivity per pound spent on production, invest in expensive machines or invest in factories near cheap labour. At some point this trend expires (3). Everyone has joined the first world.  What happens to sweatshop labour then in Asia and Africa? It gets replaced by machines, machines developed by Western firms who were competing against low wage sweatshops.  Trend 1 rolls through Asia and Africa until everyone has caught up with the state of the art.

At this point the wage differential between people like you and me and our Brazilian and Chinese equivalents has disappeared. There are no more cheap holidays, but they are buying Scotch and Chamber Choir tickets at an unprecedented rate. What happens to people who don’t have the skills to do a useful job when the sweatshop closes is, problematic.

The other effect is that instead of an economy of about 1 billion rich people, we have an economy of potentially 9 billion rich people. Commodities become expensive. Research and development and shared infrastructure becomes comparatively cheap.

The third trend is to do with weak-form Artificial Intelligence and expert systems. By weak-from AI I mean computer systems that are not actually intelligent but might appear that way to someone interacting with them.  The software that recommends things you might like on Amazon is an example of early weak-form AI. Or at least the kind of functionality. As the software gets better and better and the hardware to run it on gets cheaper and cheaper then more and more of our lives interact with weak-form AI.  Our house learns when we are home and when we are not home and tunes our heating system accordingly. Our phones / email terminals spot when we make an appointments and automatically check for clashes between your diary and mine and then try to book the cheapest travel. Planes fly themselves, cars drive themselves, factories run themselves. The super market can make a good guess at what you want to buy and knows how to sell you stuff it has a surplus of. A mining operation can operate a mine, from spotting the deposit to designing the environmental safeguards, to doing the digging and selling the output on the commodities market without much in the way of human intervention.

A whole bunch of what we think of as brain work gets the Edmund Cartwright and Henry Ford treatment. Just as fewer and fewer jobs over the last 250 years required human hands, fewer and fewer jobs in the future require human brains. (4)

So we reach a point where machines can do almost all labour and the amount of human labour required to produce a Western standard of living is hours a month but unless you own the machines you might not have anything to trade for the output of the machines. A trivial level on tax on those who are employed or own machines is sufficient to offer the unemployed a better material standard of living than you and I enjoy. If you can levy any tax at all on anyone.

The confluence of these trends presents really difficult questions for all of us. What skills do you need when a $5 piece of machinery can do most jobs better and quicker than you and it’s not clear which jobs exactly it can’t do better or won’t be able to do better in five years’ time?  How do we deal with the gap between those who own capital and those who don’t? How does our society look when we are all Idle Rich? Or half of us are and the other half are unemployed and there is no welfare system? Does wealth and property ownership even mean anything?

(1) I’m not really a hipster geek. I’m not sure such a thing exists.

(2) joke’s on them if the Zombie Apocalypse happens first.

(3) Already labour rates in some parts of China are approaching the point where factories are not being opened there but are staying in the West or being opened in other parts of Asia.

(4) Washing up looks like it might a difficult task to automate, so you’re okay but I’m going to be destitute.