2013-10-12

A Vision of the Future: A World Filled With Robots and Religious Fundamentalists?

Mish has a post up: Dark Vision for Jobs: Jobless Future? Is It Different This Time?, in which he discusses automation. Some analysts are starting to predict major job losses due to automation hitting all levels of jobs, from complex to the simple.

The most likely future path I see unfolding, if there really is no future innovation that requires large numbers of workers, is one where people are plugged into immersive games and entertainment. In a world of automation, what will be the cost of providing the average citizen with a basic existence? Think about how many people are going on disability, how many are already happy on food stamps and welfare. Now consider that the trend is for young people to drive less and to entertain themselves digitally. Entertainment costs could plunge and people will be plugged in all day. Imagine how many people would accept a life of no work and no responsibility.

Many Westerners already choose a hedonistic lifestyle and do not have children. If there was an even easier path to this lifestyle, one could imagine a highly automated world functioning with a very low birthrate. Charles Murray has proposed the minimum income to replace all welfare, and Switzerland may vote it in. Under the Murray proposal, if people have children they will receive no cost of living increase. Therefore, there will be a great incentive for people not to have children, because having children will mean the need to work (at all, let alone harder). And while it is tossed around as a joke, there really may be some issue once the sex industry develops authentic sex bots. At that point, the fertility rate may plunge for real because in the automated society, where's the incentive for government to reverse a decline in fertility? The Catholic Church and other traditional religions will oppose it, but their sphere of influence will be reduced to a small number of reactionaries who refuse the easy life. They will be people who still choose to do manual labor even for no pay (like Benedictine monks) and have multiple (or any) children.

Over enough generations, everyone who doesn't want to work will have voluntarily remove themselves from the gene pool. This could lead to a future with a large population of religious people (though a population far below today's world population) who maintain the automated systems and do the jobs, with an elite creative/entrepreneurial class who eventually reach stable fertility.

That's not really a prediction, but I think it's most plausible than some of the dystopian visions of over population. From a Christian perspective, this future world would be a dystopia (or at least the path arriving at it), but many people might willingly choose this lifestyle if it were offered. Instead of a government imposed Brave New World of genetic engineering, it would be a voluntarily chosen Brave New World. The wide gate will be offered, and many will willingly pass through it.

In fact, I expect people will find jobs. It may require a lot of people to keep the machines running and if automation really takes off, total production could soar. Freed up labor will be redeployed. With higher profits, businesses that find ways to do more with cheaper labor will out-compete their rivals. In the short-run, energy bottlenecks will slow automation. In the intermediate term, new jobs will be created. In the very long-run though, when science fiction starts becoming a reality, then we might see some type of future where machines can outperform the majority of humans at most tasks—but that day is still quite a ways off.

No comments:

Post a Comment