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.