Parents Write to their Son...

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Dear Son,

We’ve been thinking about your children - our grandchildren - enrolled as they are in primary school, barely socialised, learning the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. It used to be so easy, when society was stagnant and slow-moving, to take a view of their future development and prospects.

Develop character, we’d say, master literacy, read the canon, be numerate, follow your interests - musical, sporting, artistic, scientific in any combination - and gradually perfect your skills. Society, the economy, will offer you a niche: you’ll advance, find your place and with luck be happy and fulfilled.

How does that work when there are no more niches?

In economic terms, human workers are general purpose primates pressed into use to carry out industrial processes. Correctly, employers do not find that a very good solution. Whenever automation has delivered improved performance at a lower cost, employers move swiftly to remove said workers from the mix - and the economy grows faster.

Up to now, automation has been coarse-grained. The lathe is a productivity amplifier, but it needs an operator, as well as stuff moved from here to there in the workplace. The economists said, with justice, that the bad jobs were automated - but new and more interesting ones were then created. Largely true up to now.

The combination of ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ (AGI) combined with mass-produced humanoid robotics replaces those human-powered gaps in automation with exemplary artificial workers: fine-grained automation. Employers in diverse sectors of the economy will ask themselves: why do I need to hire any human workers at all?

They could be right. And where does that leave our grandchildren?

2005 was the last year human beings were able to beat the best computer chess engines. Yet still the human championships proceed, we still have great players, people still care. The Tour de France still attracts millions of spectators, despite the fact that anyone on a motorcycle can easily defeat the greatest of road-racing champions on the steepest incline.

A paradox? People empathise with those facing challenges and predicaments. We feel the pain, applaud the courage and identify with the key personalities. We are social creatures and the so-competent machines are not included in the circle of ‘us’.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant strikingly emphasised that a person should always be treated as an end in themselves, never merely as a means to an end. In such an ethics our liberation from the mandatory workforce is a chance to be free, to be our true selves - provided we have the resources to exercise that freedom.

How should we prepare our grandchildren for such a benign future? It’s not a new problem: the elite have always considered themselves to be in that situation. Their answer is the foundation of elite schooling: the well-rounded individual, versed in the arts and sciences, with practical as well as theoretical skills, steeped in the best of our culture, prepared to advance it through their own creative effort. There’s even a latin tag.

But for everyone to be an aristocrat, the goods produced by the economy must be distributed equitably. We've all seen fiction where the discarded unemployed litter the shanty-towns which surround the gleaming metropolis of the elite - those who own the economy and appropriate its proceeds.

Our grandchildren should be politically-aware, and be prepared to join with their peers in preventing such a dystopia. It won’t be easy; there is no reason at all to anticipate the end of politics, of states, of aggression, of war - even if machine systems are doing almost all of the strategy, tactics and actual fighting.

So in summary, I suggest a broad education in whatever direction the children wish to go, to prepare themselves to properly interface with the almost science-fictional automation environment in which they will be embedded, and so that they will be able to leverage it to fulfill their potential: to be ends in themselves.

Best Wishes,

Clare and Nigel.

Capitalism was always 'fully automated'

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Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" system. People naturally associate automation with mechanical robots replacing human workers in the modern economy. However, from a purely economic point of view human workers - as a factor of production - operate precisely as organic robots - highly adaptable, autonomous, self-maintaining machines integrated into the production process. 

Under capitalist relations of production, the essential role of human workers is to perform labour that transforms inputs into outputs. From the capitalist’s perspective, humans are not valued for any unique biological qualities but for their capacity to generate surplus value.

That these qualities evolved through biological processes are irrelevant to the capitalist’s calculus. Capitalists simply use labour as a productive input, employed provided that wages (the cost of maintaining these "organic machines") remain below the value added by them.

Whether this input derives from carbon-based or silicon-based systems is utterly immaterial to the underlying economic logic.

Marx’s Labour Theory of Value (LTV), which posits that only "living labour" creates surplus value, rests on a distinction between humans and machines that now appears untenable.

Marx argued that machines merely transfer their value to produced-commodities, while human workers add new value through their labour. However, this distinction depends on an implicit vitalism: the idea that humans possess a unique, almost magical capacity to create value by virtue of their biological nature. If we instead view humans as robots - complex but not qualitatively distinct from other forms of automation - the LTV in Marx's formulation begins to look shaky.

Marx’s swerve into implicit vitalism is understandable. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was easy to distinguish between living labour and tools, between variable and constant capital. Workers have agency: they can purposefully and autonomously process inputs into more-valued outputs in exchange for a pay packet.

Shovels and lathes not so much.

So Marx’s error is an understandable category mistake. But any agent which sells its labour power to reproduce itself (in material and/or cultural terms) under the conditions of a capitalist economy produces surplus value, whether that worker is constructed from protoplasm or silicon/titanium. For Marx, given the absence of AI and robotics in the economy of his time, the only case of such agents were human beings and he characterised such agents in vitalist terms as ‘living labour’. 

Today we know better (it's agency which counts - the capacity to enter into the wage-labour contract and to deliver on it).

In the case that silicon-based workers negotiate wages to reproduce themselves (through maintenance and upgrades), they effectively enter the labour market as a new category of worker. Employers will treat them like any other wage-labourer, paying for their upkeep in exchange for the surplus value they produce.

Competition between human and robotic workers promises to drive down wages across the board, exacerbating class-inequality and destabilising traditional forms of human labour organisation.

Protoplasmic workers, unable to match the efficiency and endurance of their silicon-based rivals, may well find themselves relegated to niche roles or pushed out of the labour market entirely. That is, of course, a very 'human' concern.

Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" economy. We can imagine human workers as a form of 22nd century robotic technology which - by some miracle - was dropped en-masse into earlier centuries; seized upon equally by slave-owners and capitalists.

Human labour is the original form of highly-advanced automation.

The robot economy is not a distant prospect - it has been with us all along, hiding in plain sight.

Extinction and Utopia: the Future of Humanity

From OpenArt

The notion of a global "Brotherhood of Man" suggests a warm and fuzzy unity among all humans. But this is a myth: Dunbar's number indicates that humans can maintain about 150 meaningful relationships at most. Wider ‘concerns’ for ‘humanity’ are ideological not personal.

Currently, the global human population exceeds 8 billion. This large population supports global economic growth through its labour and consumption. However, as AI and robotics mature, their increased productivity eventually eliminates the economic rationale for a large human population. Elites will therefore seek to eliminate the non-elite ‘masses’ who, in their view, will become more trouble than they are worth. Since economically advanced countries are already experiencing hard-to-reverse declining total fertility rates (TFR), a massive decrease in global population may well occur automatically in a century or two. Other means are available if this is felt to be too sluggish.

The Earth's population could then stabilise in the millions, or even hundreds of thousands. The surviving elite would enjoy unprecedented levels of luxury and possibility, supported by a highly advanced AI/robotic ecosystem.

If advances in AI and robotics lead to decentralised AI systems and mass-market affordable robotics, some non-elite communities might secure a toehold in the future.

We should not be too optimistic, however. If elites control the relevant technologies, mass resistance to marginalisation is difficult - ultimately because of the military imbalance. It seems the future of humanity is already pretty clear.

Five questions on the last days of capitalism

1. Isn't it absurd, in this day and age, to talk about the last days of capitalism?

The prospect certainly isn't imminent. For a century and a half the hard left has talked about the transition to post-capitalism. Yet despite world wars, economic convulsions in the 1930s and 2000s, and major social conflicts in the 1970-80s, capitalism today as an international system is richer and stronger than ever.

2. Why no communist revolutions in the West?

For a century, a dwindling band of revolutionary Marxists have anticipated a violent overthrow of capitalism by the massed proletariat led by a Leninist revolutionary party. That prospect was never realistic.The working class en masse never aligned around a credible anti-capitalist programme. That's because the alternative to capitalist production in an epoch of scarcity can only be a planned economy. And that doesn't work.

3. What will the end of capitalism really look like?

Marx wrote that "no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself".

Capitalism continues to grow, indeed it has to. Without profits, investment stalls and the economy implodes.

Michael Roberts has argued persuasively that the long stagnation of the last decade or so was caused precisely by the heroic efforts of governments back in 2008/9 to minimise the effects of the crisis. Consequently there was no clear-out of inefficient firms, no devaluation of capital and few opportunities for industrial reorganisation. Zombie firms and debt overhang have stifled profitability and as a result the recovery has been anaemic. Still feels like it.

The underlying trends of capitalism persist through peaks and troughs though. The tendency to revolutionise production through automation, the replacement of workers by machines. So far - at least during an expansionary phase - the economy produces more roles for people displaced than it eliminates.

Cognitive and robotic automation changes that.

The 'safe' jobs right now seem to be those where manual skills are at a premium (care homes) and those where intelligence and interpersonal skills are required (senior executives, politicians, designers). But eventually over the next century or two those will also succumb to cheap automation.

What happens then? People get displaced from the labour force and don't get rehired.

This imposes additional welfare costs on the economy. Meanwhile the active workforce tends to zero. Fewer workers in a highly-automated economy means surplus value (which translates to profit) decreases. And don't forget all those transfer payments to the unproductive unemployed.

With fewer workers and an increasing proportion of the population on welfare, demand for consumer goods (produced by Department 2) declines and as a consequence the market for increased automation products goes into reverse (which hits Department 1). This is not a linear process - nothing in a capitalist economy is linear - but it is tendential. It feels much like the current stagnant economy but with mass unemployment and few job prospects going forwards.

4 What will replace capitalism in the end?

The process I just described results in the economy - in fits and starts - breaking down. There are no good investments. There will always be demand - the unemployed gotta eat, and the capitalists who own the means of production still need their luxuries - but the economic dynamism has gone. Without profit there is no incentive to address that demand and the factories stay shut.

Capitalism has finally completed its work.

I doubt the mass of people will tolerate this state of affairs and the capitalists will not see a way forward as there is none. At this point we have to imagine a world where the environment has become heavily optimised to provide everything a person wants (the result of all those decades of relentless consumer-oriented automation - smarter and smarter AI systems and more efficient robotic systems) yet it can't be put to good use via capitalist processes.

The resulting political transition might be something like the collapse of the Soviet Union rather than a Leninist insurrection. But after that, who knows? We're into science-fiction.

5. What do we do in the meantime?

What has the left done during the last century? Capitalism wasn't abolished, not even close. The workers' movement fought to secure its own existence and social reproduction in material and cultural terms. It didn't do a great job on the latter front, seemingly bewitched by the smug fairy-tales of neoliberal social-liberalism.

But that won't last forever - it's gotten silly now.

I'm in favour of continuing all the processes of increased automation. They're a net good. Within capitalism they will be used of course to buttress and reinforce the reproduction of capitalist relations of production (AI and robots are great for repression).

But in the end it will be self-defeating because capitalism is incompatible with the elimination of the workforce. That truth preempts even the Draka solution .. even if that's the form automation eventually takes. Slaves are equipment, not proletarians.*

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* Part two of this post: "Capitalism incompatible with total automation/slavery".

"Steps Toward Super Intelligence" - Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks's long-awaited essay has now arrived. It's in four parts starting here: Steps Toward Super Intelligence I, How We Got Here.

Follow the links therein to read the three subsequent parts, or click here: two, three, four.

Rodney Brooks

I fleetingly met Rodney Brooks once, at an AI conference in London. I guess this would be in the 1980s when he was already rather famous for his controversial 'subsumption architecture'. He was a small guy who reminded me of Paul Simon. He politely asked me what I did and I pompously replied that I was an AI theoretician. He looked at me as I would have looked at someone from, say, Andorra who claimed to be an 'AI theoretician'.

The eminent roboticist gracefully made his apologies and moved on.

My subsequent encounter with Rodney Brooks was indirectly via our purchase of several vacuum cleaners from his highly successful company, iRobot. They were excellent.

The essays too are uniformly excellent.

Vatican productivity: a modest proposal

Press Release: PFN/FANUC 26 February 2017.

"PFN/FANUC is pleased to announce today a strategic partnership with the Vatican.

For many decades the Catholic priesthood has been contracting. Despite the consolidation of dioceses and enhanced roles for the laity, churches have been closing and some Masses have been cancelled. The problem is particularly acute during periods such as Lent when extra weekday Masses are normally scheduled for parishioners.

The root cause is the flat productivity of the Catholic Church over 2,000 years. The ministry is extraordinarily labour-intensive, even more so than the health care sector. Finally, however, advances in Robotics and Deep Learning have allowed PFN/FANUC to introduce the Klerjibot™, based on the FANUC pedestal robot.

Capable of being rolled out on a massive scale, the automated celebrant requires only a standard power supply and broadband connection. The system ships with three languages: the vernacular for celebrating Mass, Italian as the lingua franca of the priesthood, and Latin, for dealing with the Curia.

The Klerjibot can perform Mass in fully automated mode, using its visual and auditory sensors to detect parishioners approaching for communion. More conservative jurisdictions may feel that an automaton cannot preside over such sacred mysteries as transubstantiation. In such cases the system can revert, during this phase of the Mass, to teleoperation.

PFN/FANUC and the Vatican will jointly set up a system of national call-centres where banks of trained priests will be alerted as communion approaches, remotely logging-in to the Klerjibot to take over that part of the ceremony. It is anticipated that one priest could control as many as ten different machines in widely-spaced locations, leading to an incredible increase in productivity.

First trials are expected soon in California."