Where is the revolution taking us?
If we can’t master the digital revolution, it may spawn a different revolt
few.
But there is a dark side to all this. As AI becomes more advanced and robots reach the Turing test point, how will they know right from wrong? How do we protect ourselves from the creatures we are creating as they eclipse our capability and control?
Leaders in the field, such as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, agree the development of full artificial intelligence is “summoning a demon.” They are alarmed that more effort is being invested in creating intelligent robots than is being allocated to imbuing them with moral preparedness.
Since the early days of the first Industrial Revolution, the “creative destruction” characteristic of capitalism has spawned dramatic change. The introduction of the steam engine, the printing press and the factory system displaced countless workers and eradicated long-established trades. But it also created countless new job opportunities, and at a slow enough pace to avoid mass unemployment.
The digital revolution may be different. Today, technological progress is so rapid that economies have far less time to adapt by creating new jobs in sectors not being impacted. The computer combined with the “internet of everything ” allows waves of new technology to be scaled up rapidly and cheaply.
It’s helped create a questionable concentration of corporate wealth in high-tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. They have a combined market capitalization of $2.5 trillion. Yet together they employ only about 600,000 people. Walmart alone, with one-tenth their market cap, employs more than 2.3 million people around the world.
Some governments and corporations are responding by trying to reform capitalism. Trying to make it kinder and gentler. Trying to make it distribute its largess more evenly across economies like Canada’s where income and wealth disparity is increasingly pronounced.
And where it prompts the rise of simplistic political solutions. But as Donald Trump would say, with genuine surprise, “It’s complex.”
For example, raising the minimum wage may lift thousands of unskilled workers out of poverty in the short term. But longer term, it can encourage more research and development into automating these unskilled jobs out of existence.
Experiments with guaranteed annual incomes are underway in several countries. Ontario plans to test a “basic annual income” for residents in three cities. There is no assurance that those who qualify will seek additional employment, or contribute time to improving their community. It may turn out to be nothing more than an opioid for the masses.