On Redundancy

I'm reading books about the advances in technology (current and expected) and it leads to some questions almost as frightening as those cause by NTE. Imagine a world in which every single remunerative activity, everything that constitutes a skill or task for which one would currently be employed, can be done faster, cheaper, and better by a machine. It struck me there will inevitably be some holdouts - poetry, music, fine crafts, design. For some reason I think the safest jobs belong to those on Savile Row although it isn't hard to imagine a combination of software and hardware that can produce clothes of a higher quality than any human. Cobblers also seemed safe for awhile. I have immense respect for cobblers. Here, for example, the the website for Gaziano Girling and Alfred Sargent who make bespoke shoes and boots that are at once extraordinarily lovely and expensive. Still, if a robot can make a fine suit, a slightly different one should be able to make equally fine shoes.

But indulge your imagination for a moment and allow yourself to conceive of a world in which humans can contribute nothing of material value. Our technology creates music, poetry, novels, regulates our economy, allocates material wealth to everyone, leaves nothing that requires human participation. People are not even necessary for the maintenance or construction of the machines. Each generation of machines is capable of both repairing itself and creating the next, improved, generation. This situation will almost certainly never come to pass - there will always be at least a few things requiring human participation - but imagine that leaves 99.9% of us with nothing useful to do. It raises an interesting question - what can human beings only do for themselves? What cannot be simulated, replicated, or performed for us?

The answer that leapt to my mind was sex. Robots might be able to handle human reproduction better than we can; as it currently stand human reproduction is a haphazard and inefficient process but there are substantial rewards for trying. And those rewards bring up that other kind of sex - recreational. That is something robots might be able to do for us, either through physical manipulation or virtual reality, but there will always be something about the real thing. At least, I hope there will be.

There are other behaviours tied inextricably to our physiology that will not be replicable - we might be able to get our nutrition some other way than eating but drinking has provided pleasure for thousands of years and can, perhaps, be relied upon to continue to do so. Still, not a lot to hold on to philosophically speaking. I get drunk, therefore I am. The real value of humans, if we are to be something more than entirely solipsistic, is in our interactions with others. There are currently many projects (and many very bright people) working on machines that are sophisticated enough to convince us of their reality. I believe there is also a Spike Jonze movie on the topic.

Computer scientists and other technologists are relying on the seemingly endless human capacity for invention to prevent their own irrelevance. Still, if a machine is able to convince us it is real (a successful human surrogate) and we've already stipulated robots capable of improving themselves, where is human invention still required? I, for one, am not ready for a world where the only humans who live useful lives are fashion designers. I use the example of fashion designers rather than, say, musicians, because music operates according to a constantly evolving structure of rules - one that migt actually be better comprehended by a machine than a person. What machines aren't good at, and might never be good at, is arbitrariness. But if I press on with the fundamental question I must allow even fashion designers will ultimately be replaced by software. And the question remains, what do we do when we have nothing to do? Or is it, what do we do when we have nothing useful to do? We couldn't possibly be relegated to lives of endless vacations. Suicides would sky-rocket.

This scenario forces me to an unexpected conclusion: the highest form of human activity is labour. I have long assumed it was either art or causing social change of a magnitude and inventiveness that it resembled art. Either the creation of new objects, ideas, or worlds. Yet it seems we could live without these things - or, more accurately, if another agent stepped in to perform these tasks for us (assuming such a thing might one day be possible) our society would change but our ontology would remain. But if labour is taken from us both our society and our ontology become unrecognizable. I have inadvertently proven, to my own satisfaction, an axiom I used to consider dubious, "There is dignity in labour." That is assuming there is dignity in humanity, something I am willing to grant.