Artificial intelligence is already coming up with better ways of doing things. And promises so much more. Such as much more efficiently analysing bio-molecular data to identify the most likely candidates for developing new antibiotics.
But it's already, also, taking away employment from humans, including, crucially, gainful employment.
Potentially, AI could become so capable and extensive that a majority of any society's working-age population is left without incomes to support itself with.
So, there's now talk of government-mandated circumscribing in terms of the development and deployment fields of the technology, putting the brakes on it. The economic systems of the world simply cannot accommodate anything else.
Which means we face the crazy situation of holding back or curtailing human progress for the sake of maintaining an outdated ideology. One must be prepared to suffer and die for it. Better for people to have paying jobs even if many will still risk dying of diseases that would otherwise be effectively treated or even cured.
A particularly stark and granular example of this happened a few years back and involved the UK. A pharmacological company had developed an effective treatment for a disease. The country's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had approved the drug for use there. However, the pharma company could not, or would not, supply the country's National Health System (NHS), an entirely taxpayer-funded universal healthcare service that's free for patients at the point of use, with it at an affordable price. During that time, a young boy, for whom it was acknowledged the drug could significantly benefit, and his family watched and waited; they could not afford to pay for the very costly drug privately, out of their own pockets. His father was interviewed on national radio about it, during which he lamented the situation. Negotiations between the company and the country's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) went on for a year before an affordable supply agreement was reached. Sadly, by this point the boy had died. The father was re-interviewed on national radio. He was, understandably, heartbroken, but also came across as if floating in some paradoxical twilight emotional and psychological state in which acceptance of the reality of cost and funding decisions having to be made met with a sense of bewildered incredulity.
We see this everywhere. Sufficiently mitigating anthropogenic climate change (global warming) is too expensive to deliver quickly enough, if at all. We must bow to the god that is the economic system. Even if it kills us. Better off dead than not having a paying job.
Economics is humanity's worldwide religion. Worse, it functions as a cult, convincing and demanding from all that drinking the Kool-Aid that it is is the best thing ever, elites egging on each other and everyone else in pursuit of humanity achieving some ultimate, nirvana-like, utopian state of living.
Here's a zinger for you: All that's needed to provide for humanity's needs and wants, to provide for humanity's material (scientific, technological, etc) progress is:
And that's it.
During the Great Depression, the only thing that had changed was the economy. The farmers' fields with crops in them still existed. The factories still existed. The same working-age population still existed. The same material things and the same work were still there. Yet the crops lay rotting in the fields. The factories stood shuttered. The working-age population sat idle, unemployed and unemployable. People starved. Some took their own lives in desperation. And all because the economy, like the proverbial computer, 'said "No"'.
Madness.
It's not just that you don't need money; it's that you don't even need an economic system. At all. Ever.
And forget the argument that economic systems are needed to motivate working-age people to work. The lure of helping to create a better life for oneself, one's family, and world as a whole is surely enough on its own. If nobody worked, we'd very quickly be back in the Stone Age, sitting in the cold and dark. With AI, people need not work yet not be left in a new Stone Age, sitting in the cold and dark.
Trying to move forward while holding ourselves back, as we still do, is a nonsensical way of doing things.
So, why haven't we changed?
Partly, it's passively sticking to tradition. The vast majority of the world's populations have an economic system of one sort of another. We're born into it. It's been around seemingly forever. Some of us may actively support this tradition. In philosophy, this is one type of what's known as a 'logical fallacy' (faulty reasoning, whether based on true or false premises), specifically, 'the appeal to tradition': 'this is the way we've always done things, therefore this is how we should continue to do things'. Then there's the assumption that having an economic system is like having the laws of physics: they're an immutable aspect of the universe. Then there's the experience of things apparently going well, when living standards improve, new technologies invented and deployed, downturns accepted as 'just the way it goes'; temporary blips, the expectation that what goes down will come back up again.
However, there are deep-rooted, biological reasons. Humans are naturally selfishly greedy. That means we are driven to actively compete with one another, as individuals or groups, up to and including nations against nations. This means we are naturally prejudiced and given to express that prejudice in the form of discrimination, such as racial discrimination; humans cannot actively compete with each other if they cannot perceive differences between each other, such as skin colour. ('Natural', by the way, doesn't necessarily mean a particular thing (behaviour) is morally and ethically benign or good, similarly, something (behaviour) that is 'unnatural' is not necessarily morally and ethically benign or bad. Morality and ethics are hugely important but separate issues.)
Let's assume that humans have freewill (it's inconceivable to me how we could ever possibly know either way). We have an advanced consciousness of ourselves and the world around us, a highly detailed awareness of it. So deep is this that it effects our advanced intelligence, way more than that sufficient only for us to know there are options, choices in the world, in the first place.
But that ultimate, fundamental selfish greed instinct is a powerful force. So it is that our freewill is ever thus under its duress.
Assuming we can achieve ti, implementing changing to an economy-free world would need careful consideration.
Are we ready to change? Maybe. Maybe not. But such is the appetite for AI, particularly commercial players in the field, we may face that choice sooner rather than later, and whether we like it or not.
It's right and proper that AI be scrutinised for its potential to do harm, but, ultimately, to hold back on its development and deployment on the basis of its 'job-stealing' potential is stupid.
What do you think? (And feel free to ask an AI.)