George Rebane

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are prominent in my pantheon of our nation’s heroes.  They started with nothing, took great personal risks, worked hard, and created beneficent world class corporate empires, deservedly becoming wealthy in the process.  They are joined by countless other Americans having walked similar paths that continue to show all of us that we still live in a gloriously free country showering literally unlimited opportunities to those of us lucky to be its citizens.  In a small way, starting as a penniless refugee, I have had the opportunity to walk these roads and confirm this promised landscape of achievable dreams.

As readers know, I believe that we have now entered the post-Singularity age (more here).  Most of what will come to pass in the coming years is unknown and inconceivable to us.  What little we can apprehend is that intelligent machines will become the dominant species on this planet, and we can survive only by joining them through first becoming trans-humans on our way to the new world of in silico existence.  On this journey the utility and functions of human workers will markedly change in social orders yet unseen.  The first change is systemic unemployment that is already underway.

In a landmark 7oct26 interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Mr Bezos offered his strong opinion that the arrival of rapidly evolving superintelligence (SI) – formerly AI – will not eliminate jobs, but instead create new jobs of at least equal number.  In short, human workers will not be displaced by SI, even though productivity will increase enormously.  I have long argued that this cannot be for several reasons, the first being that all jobs are not created equal in the sense of the smarts required to perform them.

Our current workforce is deficient in both intellect and skillsets.  In light of this, SI-augmented human workers will be employable only to the extent that each worker is able to be more productive – i.e. deliver more value than before to the employing enterprise.  For any conceivable future rate of wealth generation, this reality clearly foreshadows the reduction of humans working in positions of monitoring/directing SIs in the actual functions required to accomplish the TBD work.

(A relevant footnote here is the recent workforce rotation at Microsoft.  The company furloughed 6,000 employees only to hire an additional 6,000 foreign workers with advanced skillsets to do the work which its former employees were incapable of or uneconomical to retrain.)

Those people with innate intellectual deficits will not be able to provide any value in performing the more sophisticated tasks that involve/include the new SIs which will continue to become smarter and more comprehensibly capable with every passing year (month?).  And we must include the rapid advances in SI-powered robotics that already provide anthropomorphic workers for tasks requiring extraordinary sensing, strength, speed, and/or precision of movement.  In such an environment it is hard to see what the ultimate role and number of humans should be in the workplace.  All that we can be sure of is that fewer of us will be required to be on a wage-paying job.

Speaking of wages, what shall become of the millions of ‘redundant’ humans who will sense themselves having become irrelevant to the society in which they live?  The easy answer is that they will be sustained by a national guaranteed basic income that is funded by appropriately taxing the wealth-producing enterprises and individuals – in other words, the transfer of wealth must needs increase enormously from today’s levels.  But how such people will accept their new status – the Luddite episode comes to mind.

And all of this must happen in a global setting of immense clashing of civilizations and ideologies that must resolve itself in the survival of what we know as Western civilization.  SecState Marco Rubio delivered a landmark speech on this at the Acropolis yesterday (here), in which he described the “inflection point” at which Western civilization finds itself as we are assaulted by Islamists, hegemonic tyrants, and nationally bred and unimaginably ignorant socialists intent on destroying the countries that birthed and succored them.  But all that is grist for its own treatment in these pages.