Automation and Utopia

Human Flourishing in a World without Work

John Danaher

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674983403
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Social Philosophy

Automating technologies threaten to usher in a workless future. But this can be a good thing—if we play our cards right. Human obsolescence is imminent. The factories of the future will be dark, staffed by armies of tireless robots. The hospitals of the future will have fewer doctors, depending instead on cloud-based AI to diagnose patients and recommend treatments. The homes of the future will anticipate our wants and needs and provide all the entertainment, food, and distraction we could ever desire.To many, this is a depressing prognosis, an image of civilization replaced by its machines. But what if an automated future is something to be welcomed rather than feared? Work is a source of misery and oppression for most people, so shouldn't we do what we can to hasten its demise? Automation and Utopia makes the case for a world in which, free from need or want, we can spend our time inventing and playing games and exploring virtual realities that are more deeply engaging and absorbing than any we have experienced before, allowing us to achieve idealized forms of human flourishing.The idea that we should "give up" and retreat to the virtual may seem shocking, even distasteful. But John Danaher urges us to embrace the possibilities of this new existence. The rise of automating technologies presents a utopian moment for humankind, providing both the motive and the means to build a better future.

CHAPTER 1

The Autumn of Humanity

It is the autumn of humanity and we are moments between raindrops.

(Kaj Sotala)

HUMAN OBSOLESCENCE IS IMMINENT. We are living through an era in which our activity is becoming less and less relevant to our well-being and to the fate of our planet. This trend toward increased obsolescence is likely to continue in the future, and we must do our best to prepare ourselves and our societies for this reality. Far from being a cause for despair, this is in fact an opportunity for optimism. Harnessed in the right way, the technology that hastens our obsolescence can open us up to new utopian possibilities and enable heightened forms of human flourishing.

That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book. But you might question its starting presumption. Is human obsolescence really imminent? Surely humans have never been more relevant than they are right now? As I write these words, there are approximately 7.6 billion people living on earth. By the time you read these words, there will be even more. Human influence and control over the planet is unprecedented. According to one estimate, a mere 10,000 years ago, the total human population, and their livestock and pets, accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. By the late twentieth century, the figure was 98 percent.¹ Humans now dominate the planet, wielding enormous technological power to shape (and despoil) its resources to their own advantage. People now refer to this era as the anthropocene in order to capture this sense that human influence is unprecedented. To suggest that humans are growing obsolete seems obtuse.

And yet that’s the view that motivates this book. The meaning of “obsolescence” is crucial here. Obsolescence is the process or condition of being no longer useful or used; it is not a state of nonexistence or death. I am not suggesting, nor assuming, that humans are on the cusp of extinction, though there are some who worry that might be the case.² What I am suggesting is that humans are on the cusp of becoming no longer useful—that we will no longer control the fate of the planet and the fate of our species as we have done in the recent past.

The technological forces that have made our planet-wide dominance possible are the very same forces that are hastening our obsolescence. We have created complex techno-social systems to govern our lives, manufacture our goods, and supply our services. Within these systems, we increasingly outsource and automate our decision-making through the use of robotics, artificial intelligence, and other smart machines. The trend toward automation is growing. Machines are being created to anticipate our wants and needs and provide us with all the entertainment, food, and distraction we could ever desire. Soon, there will be little left for us to do except sit back and enjoy the ride. We are moving from the anthropocene to what might be called the robocene.

To some, this sounds like a profoundly depressing prognosis.³ The purpose of this book is to challenge that attitude. Is the automated future something to be welcomed or feared? The book will defend four main propositions by way of responding to that question.

Proposition 1: The automation of work is both possible and desirable: work is bad for most people most of the time, in ways that they don’t always appreciate. We should do what we can to hasten the obsolescence of humans in the arena of work.

Proposition 2: The automation of life more generally (outside of work) is a less positive thing: there are important threats to human well-being, meaning, and flourishing that are posed by the use of automating technologies in everyday life. We need to carefully manage our relationship with technology to limit those threats.

Proposition 3: One way to manage our relationship with technology would be to build a Cyborg Utopia, but it’s not clear how practical or utopian this would really be: integrating ourselves with technology, so that we become cyborgs, might regress the march toward human obsolescence outside of work. Doing so may have many advantages but will also carry practical and ethical risks that make it less desirable than it first appears.

Proposition 4: Another way to manage our relationship with technology would be to build a Virtual Utopia, and this is both more practical and utopian than is commonly assumed: instead of integrating ourselves with machines in an effort to maintain our relevance in the “real” world, we could retreat to “virtual” worlds that are created and sustained by the technological infrastructure that we have built. At first glance, this seems tantamount to giving up, but there are compelling philosophical and practical reasons for favoring this approach.

These propositions will be defended in the two main parts of the book (two per part). Each of them is contentious. Objections may be bubbling to the surface of your mind already. I can only ask for your patience. We will be spending several hundred pages together, teasing out the implications of each of these four propositions, and subjecting them to scrutiny and critique.

The picture that emerges is complicated and qualified in various ways. I will not argue that our technological future is an unalloyed good or that it is a disaster-in-waiting.⁴ I will instead play the role of an axiological imagineer. I will imagine different possible futures and explore their consequences for human value, meaning, and flourishing (“axiology” is the philosophical term for the study of value; “imagineer” is a term sometimes used to describe a creative engineer—one who imagines and develops some unusual concept or idea). This doesn’t mean that I will take a disinterested and neutral perspective. On the contrary, I will argue that some futures are more desirable than others. But it does mean that I endeavor to exercise a degree of humility and balance in how I explore and defend my particular utopian vision. This is because I don’t just want to convince you of particular conclusions; I want to demonstrate and develop a way of thinking about the automated future, one that will allow you to understand why I think about it in the way that I do, and to reach your own conclusions about whether I am right or wrong.

That’s all before us. I want to start our journey to the automated future by providing more support for my opening contention: that human obsolescence is imminent. This is crucial to the project that lies ahead. To a large extent this book is a thought experiment. It asks the reader to suppose that human obsolescence is inevitable and to consider the consequences that might flow from this. But the book cannot be completely on the fence about the likelihood of obsolescence. Based on previous conversations I have had about this topic, I know that people will not be convinced about the need to prepare for human obsolescence unless they are given a full and vivid picture of how automating technologies are undermining (and already have undermined) the need for human activity across virtually all sectors of society. The remainder of this chapter provides the reader with this full and vivid picture by giving a brief tour of the past, present, and future of human obsolescence. Some of this may be familiar to certain readers, but I recommend reading it even if you are already fully convinced of the imminence of human obsolescence, because the examples discussed will be used again in the arguments in future chapters.

Human Obsolescence in Agriculture

Until approximately 10,000 years ago, most humans lived in small, hunter-gatherer tribes. They moved about frequently, taking what food resources they could from the animals and plants that populated the world in which they roamed.⁵ They did not engage in the intentional manipulation of the gene pools of those animals and plants; they did not settle down and form complex cities, states, and governments.

That all changed with agriculture. Through a combination of ingenuity and luck, humans learned how to actively intervene in the reproductive processes of certain animals and plants. Wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, cattle, sheep, chickens, and pigs (to name but a few) all came to depend on humans for their survival. This enabled significant increases in energy capture per person and a correlated boom in population.⁶ Complex, settled societies emerged, with large government officialdoms, laws, and institutions. Many of our social values around violence, equality, and sexual propriety emerged as a result of this shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture.⁷

The agricultural revolution was important in the development of human civilization, and agriculture remains central to how we feed our ever-growing populations.⁸ Initially, the shift to agriculture was made possible through the use of vast quantities of human and animal labor. For a long time, the human labor was premised on the institution of slavery, and until quite recently many economies in the Western world were, in effect, agricultural in nature, with the majority of the population employed in tilling fields, harvesting crops, and tending to livestock.

All that began to change a little over two hundred years ago. According to data collected by Max Roser, in Western European countries 30–70 percent of the population was employed in agriculture in the year 1800. The lowest figure was in the United Kingdom, where the Industrial Revolution had already taken hold. By the year 2012, the figures had declined to below 5 percent. The decline has been more striking and precipitous in some countries than in others. In the United States, for example, approximately 40 percent of the population was employed in agriculture as recently as the year 1900. By the year 2000, the figure had declined to 2 percent. None of this has come at the expense of productivity. Agricultural productivity has increased throughout this period, and there has been a fairly consistent correlation between societal wealth and the decline in agricultural employment.⁹

What happened? The answer lies in technology and the rise of machine labor. Instead of requiring armies of humans and animals to do the work, farmers could rely on a handful of powerful machines. These machines could harvest crops, plant seeds, and till fields faster than any combination of human and animal ever could. They also could assist and take over in the milking, feeding, and slaughtering of livestock. A handful of humans are still required, of course, to manage the increasingly large farm enterprises and to supplement the machine labor where needed, but the masses of seasonal laborers and small-holding farmers, who made up the bulk of farm laborers in the past, have been rendered obsolete by the rise of agricultural machinery.

That’s not to say that the obsolescence of humans in agriculture is complete. Certain tasks have been stubbornly resistant to automation. The most familiar example is fruit picking. Fruits are a delicate crop, easily bruised and damaged. The brute force of a harvesting machine is ill-fitted for the task of plucking them from the branches upon which they grow. Fruit picking has, consequently, remained a source of employment for many human beings, often seasonal or migrant workers, who work under dubious conditions of employment. But this too is now changing. In the United States, fruit growers are “eager for automation” due to an ongoing decline in the availability of seasonal labor, and some companies, Abundant Robotics and FFRobotics being the best known, are racing to satisfy the demand. Early trials of Abundant’s apple-picking robots have been impressive and have led companies such as Google to invest in the future of the technology. The Abundant robot has been made possible by a remarkable convergence of technological advances. These include improvements to the visual processing, pattern recognition, and physical dexterity of robots, and also changes in the genetic manipulation of apple trees and the physical design of orchards. We have bred shorter, wider apple trees that yield more fruit and make it easier to engineer a robot that can identify and pick apples from their branches. Couple that with broader avenues between the rows of apple trees, and you have an environment that is ripe for automation.¹⁰

So while agriculture was once an arena in which human dominance was clearly expressed, it is now a testament to the growing power of the machine and the slow and steady march toward human obsolescence.

Human Obsolescence in Manufacturing

Since I started with the agricultural revolution, the next logical step is the Industrial Revolution. From about 1750 onward, our predominantly agricultural economies have been gradually displaced by predominately industrial ones. Era-defining technological developments in the processing and capturing of energy from fossil fuels led to dramatic increases in industrial output and productivity. Starting in the United Kingdom and spreading across the rest of the Western world, masses of workers migrated from the countryside to the city.¹¹ This led to significant social and political upheaval, particularly with the emergence of the middle class and their bourgeois values and sensibilities.¹²

The story of the Industrial Revolution was initially a story of human ingenuity and dominance. A handful of key technological innovations, such as the steam engine and the mechanical loom, yielded enormous gains in economic output. They also necessitated a significant redeployment of h...