Advocates of AI often talk about the utopia this new technology will bring about – no more drudgery at the office or factory, no more housework or financial planning, no more medical conundrums. When experts are asked how people will fare in the face of having nothing to do, you get something like this exchange between Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who recently published a book called Deep Utopia, and Spencer Klavan, a classics scholar and podcast host:
Bostrom: You could have the A.I.s and the robots doing basically all economically productive tasks. You then have a leisure society where there is no longer any need for humans to work…. It would obviously require some cultural transformation and adaptation. But ultimately, I think we could easily imagine living in such a world.
There are already various groups of people that don’t work for a living that you could look to for inspiration. Young children don’t work for a living. They seem to have a good life…
Klavan: It depends if you aspire to live like children.
Bostrom: Then we have retired people…. They go around traveling, spend time with their grandchildren. They have hobbies. They watch movies. They golf.
So we elders have become the models for AI utopia. To boot, all our infirmities will be cured by AI so we will live much longer, giving us many more utopian years of watching movies, seeing the world, and playing with the next generation of great-grandchildren (who will probably prefer their robo-nannies?). I have lots of questions.
Who is going to pay for all this? Companies who are investing in AI so that they can reduce wages are not about to foot the bill for us all to go golfing, are they? And, whatever kind of income we might have for the very, very long retirement that AI longevity will provide for us, will we have enough money to pay for cruises? We already do not have enough younger workers to support Social Security, and I very much doubt that robots will contribute to either Social Security or Medicare since they won’t be earning anything.
But even if all the rest of it worked out, what kind of world would we have? This generation is not the first to worry over this problem. Competing utopian narratives in the nineteenth century either had technology actually giving us something like utopia (think Bellamy’s Looking Backward) or creating worlds where technology had had to be banned to make life livable (Butler’s Erewhon or Morris’s News from Nowhere).
The twentieth century longshoreman and homespun philosopher, Eric Hoffer, addressed the problem about the end of work after he saw how new machinery handled the large rolls of newsprint that used to require great strength and skill by the dockworkers. He labeled the problem “automation” and wrote a notable essay about it in his book The Temper of Our Time, Hoffer talks about creating big universities of a sort for people who don’t have to work to give them projects and purpose. Hoffer was an autodidact himself, so this was his idea of utopia. One could do worse.
But what if what you do really has no purpose? Mathematicians are surely pondering this now that AI has blown up the profession, but we should all be thinking about it. What if AI can shop for us better than we can shop for ourselves and produce hand-crafted furniture quicker and better than we possibly could? I still knit hats and sweaters even though the finished products surely cost more and take more time than what I would find on sale on the internet. And what will we do if we have even more time? We know that we will never play chess or Go as well a machine – so are we just pretending? Does that make these things games within games? Ezra Klein warns: “That a machine can beat a chess grandmaster has not meant the end of human beings playing chess. But humanity’s sense of purpose and control and primacy is a harder and more ineffable thing to replace.”
I like games. Every day I do five of the NY Times puzzles and occasionally enjoy a game of cards. It is fun to test our skills and distract ourselves temporarily from the mundane problems of a life. Games make exercise more enjoyable and are a sociable way to spend time with others. But what does it mean if all of life is a game? Here’s one problem with games – they are simply a way of killing time. Isn’t time too precious to kill? Is this what we want? But, if everything else is taken away, what else is there?
Does it make a difference what kind of games we play? In his remarkable book, Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse differentiates between finite games, where the goal is to win, and infinite games, where the goal is to keep the game going forever. For instance, if the goal (as in Monopoly) is to amass the most wealth, we might cut down the forests. But if the goal is to keep our world going forever, it would be part of the game to save the forests. And perhaps we would be wondering what kind of game AI is playing and thinking seriously about whether the rules of an infinite game would allow for AI.
But I resist calling life a game, and if the pundits are looking to retired people for models of how to live when we don’t have to work, maybe we should think very closely about what the utopia of our retirement is or should be. As Jeanette Winterson says: “the question ‘How shall I live?’ is fierce.”
In 1976, when Hoffer was about 74, he published a series of short essays called In Our Time. Having witnessed the turmoil of the sixties, he thinks we have learned something:
And we have grown wiser. We now know that affluence is a threat to social stability; that the adult’s failure of nerve is more critical than the young’s impulse toward anarchy; that righting wrongs is a perilous undertaking which needs a tightening of social discipline; that a sense of usefulness is more vital to the quality of life than abundance or even freedom.
A sense of usefulness is more vital to the quality of life than abundance or even freedom. Think about it.
I have written about games and utopias frequently. If you are interested, you might look at “Retirement as Utopia” or “Huxley’s Last Utopia.”