What if They Don't Need Us Anymore?

It appears that the automation wave has finally come for white-collar work, and if you believe the AI hype, suddenly many software engineers are faced with a real possibility of being out of work in the next decade. And unlike some previously automated workforces, we lack the protections of unions or professional organizations to soften the blow. As a working software engineer, I have been left wondering: what does a world full of software, but without software engineers look like? But in so wondering, another question formed that I can’t shake, gnawing at me in the background: what is the natural limit of automation? And how much of humanity can be automated?

I keep thinking about the war in Ukraine, fought in large part by drones: small units of drone operators are able to hold their own against much larger forces, better armed and equipped. Those units too, are shifting to be drone based. Beyond Ukraine the vision of warfare conducted by drones is everywhere: the F35 program, the surveillance and strike capabilities used by the CIA and state departments, the list goes on. And outside of warfare the idea is the same: American capitalists laud the idea of Chinese “dark factories,” production facilities with a bare minimum of human supervisors and technicians, characterized by their lack of full-time lighting; the robots can see in the dark. In the realm of finance, it’s already the case that algorithms do most of the trading, with human traders rare exceptions (or in the case of retail traders, simply exit liquidity.) The very machinery of the free market doesn’t truly rely on humans to function, just their AI agents. Self driving cars, AI legal council, automated speed cameras, the list goes on and on. Seemingly every part of life has a few well-funded startups looking to automate away the humans involved. 

In the 18th century, global elites relied on the people in their countries to do things like fight their wars, cook their meals, and till their fields. To sustain an individual of the nobility, or in the imperial court, required vast numbers of average people. Now, global elites don’t need us to fight their wars. They don’t need us to till their fields, or make their food. Increasingly they don’t even need us to make them art, drive them around, or even pull them over for speeding. There used to be an implicit social contract that as long as average people were needed, elites would try to keep them alive. But In 20 years, how many average people will one of the global elite need to fulfill all their wants and needs? What about 20 years after that? 

Western society offers a vision for what happens to the economically unproductive. My state of California is, like others, beset by a homelessness crisis. Yet the typical narrative even in this supposedly enlightened state, is that these individuals either deserve it, or are beyond help. Therefore, for many homeless people, their fate is to be in and out of state custody, state hospitals, or state psychiatric care.  They are abused and ignored at every turn. This banishment to an underclass lets middle-class folks view the homeless as a sort of abstract cautionary tale, and allows policy makers to ship them off to other jurisdictions, or simply leave them to die on the street. Even many of the sympathetic are cautious about solutions that give the homeless services or goods they "don't deserve;" in our country, healthcare and social services are often gated by employment to encourage productivity. It’s a deliberate political and economic construction in which earning a wage (or owning capital) represents a political, rather than economic, claim to resources. Said another way: A persistent American idea is that if you don't have a job, it's because you're unemployable. And if you're unemployable, you don't deserve help. So what happens when most people don't have a job?

Tech-libertarians would argue that universal basic income can solve this. Give those who can't make it themselves the money they need to participate in a mass-market economy, and we never have to develop a new system. Perhaps that will be part of the solution, especially since it involves minimal introspection. But I can't see why the elites in the western world would turn from their policy of "we help those who help themselves" to a sudden policy of "actually it's fine, we'll help you anyways." And if there's no plan to help those whose lives were obviated by automation... we can already see their fate. 

If they don't need us anymore, why should we be taking up their space and resources? Why not free those things up? Cram us into smaller spaces, remove safety legislation from cars and buildings, convince us to take health risks like skipping vaccinations, and maybe there will just be fewer of us naturally. Make the phones more addictive than socializing, give us diet pills to cut our food intake, put us on antidepressants, and maybe we'll free up the resources ourselves. Maybe the path of least resistance, the last remnants of the 20th century system decaying and degrading, is enough to do the work naturally. Why should they fix it? If they don't need us anymore, why help us exist at all? 

Responsible AI disclosure: AI was used in the editing of this post, but none was written by AI.