Labour Day 2017: The Future of Labour

I booked this day off, and I’m trying not to think of work; I’m not doing that successfully. My weekend was loaded with enough tasks that constitute a full few days of putting chaos to order. Long story short, I was dealing with the results of electrical and steam pressure explosions, plus putting out fires in the floor below me. Add the shooting that happened down the block last Thursday, and it makes me think I'd be safer in Afghanistan. I exaggerate though. The electrical explosion was more like a humongous zap from the power supply in my 10 year old desktop PC, the steam pressure was from a weakened emergency release valve on an old pressure cooker I had, and the fire downstairs was a lapse in judgement from an elderly resident who left the building without shutting her stove off. The shooting, unfortunately, was real. Gang related methinks. I've been fixing everything around here including the kitchen sink, quite literally. The corroded drain fell apart, and on top of salvaging components, hard drives and data from my desktop, I was soldering screwing in and soldering pipes. I'm not really bitter about it all though. It was stuff that I should have done late last year/early this year: things that were already on my to do lists before my arm was injured. I welcomed the escape into doing something more logical and methodical with materials aside from just cooking and writing. 

My thoughts stray to the state I was in around time last year, and remembering the fears that I had about having complications from my surgery, and not recovering fully, with the possibility of rendered to a state where I’d be partially disabled. If this aspect of the past wasn’t enough to bother me, even though I recovered fully from it, thoughts of what the future possibly holds in terms of work and labour in general are sparking in my mind as well. These thoughts were also prompted from me perusing science and tech magazines and periodicals during my down time. Tinkering with and pulling the guts out of my old computer was a prompt too.

I also blame it on a program on CBC radio I was listening to yesterday for getting this all started, which was an interview with a leading intellect and authority about the very real possibilities and global impacts of the further exponential advancement of AI (artificial intelligence), cybernetics, and robotics in sectors the work force, where there are scenarios of human labour being rapidly rendered obsolete due to more efficient computers, the inexhaustibility of machine power, and the increasingly more intricate and variable operations that robots are being designed to perform. It is already making an impact now. White collar jobs are even no longer safe. There is a computerized AI ‘lawyer’ now operating in New York which can review and summarize law matters many times more faster and efficiently than any human attorney. Banks and investment firms are relying on computer algorithms more and on humans less to make many times faster than lightning quick decisions on where and how to invest capital. What does this mean for our economic system based on the need for humans to make an income to consume stuff, the distribution of wealth, and purposeful creation of services and resources to give our currencies value; our sense of welfare and job security based on employability and ridiculous standards of meritocracy, our standard of health and education and how they would radically change, our sociological and psychological well-being, or our remaining services that can’t simply be replaced by microchip loaded black boxes. What role is left for a human where the machine not only replaces the worker, but no longer is in control by a human being because of ever advancing AI? What does that all ultimately mean for whatever progress was made by the Unions and labour movement on behalf of human labourers?

Elon Musk, Stephan Hawking, and other intellects and innovators are already beginning to warn us about unchecked development and advancement of AI, and the approach of the singularity*: the point in our history, where as futurist Ray Kurzweil said, when all computer technology and their networks would be in a state of being fully integrated and able to operate autonomously. This leads to all sorts of scenarios, mostly negative, including the extreme of purposeful AI generated enslavement or extermination of human beings, like the futures in the Matrix or the Terminator movies.

There are too many questions with too many vague and abstract answers to these matters for me to entertain. If there are any positives that I’d like to see happen from the inevitable displacement of people by cybernetics it would be the following:

·         More time on our hands to create purpose in designing and building sustainable communities and environments

·         Less wasted and expended time and energy just for the sake of presenteeism

·         The reassessment of the value of the low-paying, yet intricate and essential jobs that a robot can’t do for people, like assisting sick and disabled people with heavy care needs.

·         Less accidents and injury, because robots replace humans in high risk work environments

·         More time to devote for securing and raising families better, the most essential job, instead of being divided from them all the time with commitments at work

·         A change in school curricula that teaches kids to behave like human beings, instead of preparing them to be just a bunch of hypercompetitive tools to be exploited (or exploiters) as they develop into their adulthood.

·         A radical change in a culture of elitism, with (hopefully) an implementation of UBI (Universal Basis Income) strategy to divide and distribute wealth generated by automatons.

Some of these things are just in the sky, others I’m probably looking upon naively, but whatever the case, I sense a great and massive upheaval in the very near future centred on this very issue. One that I haven’t even scratched the surface of.

*- Ray predicted that the level of technology that would allow this to happen will be available sometime between 2040 -2045, some pundits say it may happen even sooner. Whatever the case, there may be a chance that it will occur in my lifetime, thus there is merit into thinking about such matters and scenarios.