In Natural Law, I had touched upon the idea that we will have to make choices as a species in the context of the role of artificial intelligence in our lives, and how/if compassion towards each other would play a part in these decisions. As I watch thoughts and events unfolding around me, I am beginning to think that it will most likely not be one crucial decision later in time, but a lot of smaller choices, made at individual and regional levels now, that will shape our society in terms of acceptability, morality etc. And so, just as I wrote in a post around five years ago, that we might not be able to recognise the final step we make in our integration with AI, there might be an increasing inevitability about our choices as we move forward in time.
What sparked this line of thought? On one hand, I read a New Yorker post titled “Better All the Time” which begins with how a focus on performance came to athletics and has now moved on to many other spheres of our life. On the other hand, I read this very scary post in The Telegraph “The Dark Side of Silicon Valley” and a bus that’s named Hotel 22 because it serves as an unofficial home for the homeless. It shows one of the first manifestations of an extreme scenario (the nation’s highest percentage of homeless and highest average household income are in the same area!) that could soon become common. The connection I made between these two posts is that increasingly, there will be one set of humans who have the will and the means to be economically viable and another much larger set that doesn’t have one, or both. This disparity is going to become even more stark as we move forward in time. I think, before we reach the golden age of abundance, (if we do) there will be a near and medium term of scarcity for the majority.
A few days before I wrote this, TaxiForSure introduced Nano taxis. Though taxi service providers have also tried to integrate auto rickshaws, at least one publication carried the news that there was a chance of protests because obviously the auto rickshaw drivers were feeling threatened. They should be, because as a consumer, Uber and its ilk have given me enough reason to delete auto rickshaws from my life. It isn’t as though I am not conscious that livelihoods are at stake here, but I do not see it as a problem I need to think about. It is only logical that my thoughts will be similar when mechanisation would eliminate jobs.
Different decisions across continents, connected by a narrative thread that downplays compassion in the name of human progress. This is by no means a judgment. I am as guilty as a corporate giant which replaces humans with automated systems, we vary only in degrees. The good news is that around me, I see an acknowledgment of this problem. (What Happens to Society When Robots Replace Workers is a good read in this context) The bad news is that we don’t seem to have a tangible solution. How really does one really arrive at a societal approach to this period of transition when an increasing number of humans (us!) will lose jobs and begin a free fall in the economy’s value chain? I can only think of empathy, but ironically, it is the selfishness that helped us survive that is standing in our way. In our race for more, we have increasingly forgotten our humanity, and that might be just the thing that ends the human race.
Bonus reads: Some exaggeration, but 9 jobs robots could replace in 2015 and Bots now outnumber humans on the web
One thought on “Artificial Humanity”