Nội dung

THE LIGHTS IN THE TUNNEL / 234 Trouble in China If consumer spending in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world remains depressed, China may ultimately find it difficult to sustain the growth it needs to keep its workers employed. Giant retailers in the United States will likely continue to exert extreme pressure on Chinese manufacturers to produce ever cheaper, better and more sophisticated products. These businesses may have little choice but to turn increasingly to automation as a way to improve efficiency and trim costs. In a society that offers little in the way of a safety net, the saving rate among Chinese workers might remain very high, or perhaps even increase, in spite of the government’s efforts to somehow spur consumer spending. All this may lead to increased incidents of civil unrest and instability. Continuing Instability in the Financial Markets As everyone knows, the current crisis began with the subprime meltdown. A case can certainly be made that stagnating wages played a role in the cause of that meltdown. Obviously, low wages made it difficult for these people to repay their loans. Beyond that, I think it is also true that, to some degree, the motivation behind subprime loan programs was the idea of the “ownership society.” Basically, in light of increasing evidence that wages paid to average people no longer offer a likely path to success, we turned instead to the promise of real estate speculation and tried to extend it to as many people as possible. Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon Appendix / Final Thoughts / 235 It didn’t turn out well, and the lesson is that virtually all asset values in our economy are based on the assumption that we are going to continue having a vibrant mass market economy supported by robust consumer spending. If that basic assumption is threatened, we are very likely to see increased risk, volatility and, ultimately, deflating values. The “ownership society” idea just isn’t workable— consumers need incomes (and confidence in the continuity of those incomes) to support the sustained discretionary spending that powers the economy. Remember: Everything that is produced by the economy is ultimately consumed by individual human beings.* Ugly and irrational political battles If trends similar to the ones I’ve listed above do develop, and if there is no coherent understanding and reasonable consensus regarding what is occurring, a dark scenario may develop. Political battles will become even more heated, partisan and irrational. Many politicians may act in even more purely self-interested ways as they come to genuinely fear the specter of their own unemployment. Conservatives will likely cling to the idea that taxes should be cut on business even as it becomes clear that such cuts will result in little or no job creation. Liberals GDP is equal to Personal Consumer Spending + Business Investment (which occurs in anticipation of future consumer spending) + Net Exports (consumer spending in other countries) + Government Spending (money that the government spends to provide services to individual people). It all comes down to individual people buying stuff. * Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon THE LIGHTS IN THE TUNNEL / 236 may call for increased job training even as the prospects for more educated workers are diminishing. They may also throw their weight behind organized labor, and this will lead to a continuing balkanization of the workforce into a protected elite versus a far larger number of highly vulnerable workers. Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon Appendix / Final Thoughts / 237 Outsmarting Marx The central thesis of this book is that, as technology accelerates, machine automation may ultimately penetrate the economy to the extent that wages no longer provide the bulk of consumers with adequate discretionary income and confidence in the future. If this issue is not addressed, the result will be a downward economic spiral. It must be acknowledged that this idea is quite similar to the predictions that were made by Karl Marx in the mid to late 1800s. Marx predicted that capitalism would suffer from a relentless “accumulation of capital,” resulting in massive unemployment and wages that would be driven down below subsistence level. This in turn would result in diminished consumer demand, falling profits and ultimately economic crisis or even collapse. If the arguments in this book prove correct, then we may be in the somewhat uncomfortable position of conceding that Marx was, at least in some ways, perceptive about the challenges the capitalist system would eventually encounter. That, of course, does not mean that we should consider adopting Marx’s solution. He advocated the abolition of private property, a centrally planned economy, and perhaps most chillingly, the overthrow of governments and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the wake of the collapse of communism, these ideas have been shown unequivocally to be non-starters. They deserve to be swept into the dustbin of history. The answer to the problem is clearly to adapt our system. The free market economy is not a natural phenomeCopyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon THE LIGHTS IN THE TUNNEL / 238 non. It is really a machine that we have built and refined over centuries: it is an engine that is fundamentally driven by incentives. Marx wanted to take a sledgehammer to that engine. Our job is to tune it, and even re-engineer it if necessary, so that it will continue to power prosperity indefinitely. Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon Appendix / Final Thoughts / 239 The Technology Paradox Most people who watch movies or have read science fiction novels are familiar with the potential paradoxes associated with time travel. For example, if you were able to travel back in time and then do something to prevent your parents from meeting before you were born, or perhaps kill a younger version of yourself, then you would presumably cease to exist. While we obviously don’t need to worry too much about the practical problems of owning a time machine, I think that there is a somewhat analogous issue associated with the future of technology. Many technologists who think deeply about the future believe that genuinely amazing things are possible. These visions include things such as truly intelligent machines and advanced nanotechnology that would allow us to transform matter, generate abundant clean energy and perhaps create tangible objects with the same ease that we now create graphics on a computer screen. There is also a great deal of speculation about fantastic medical advances that might cure major diseases and perhaps even dramatically extend the human lifespan.* While many diet books are a bit ambitious in terms of what they promise, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman take things to an entirely new level with two books (Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever) based on the premise that if you can just hold on long enough to make it to the point of extraordinary technological acceleration (the “Singularity”), you should be able to take advantage of the continuous medical advances that will ensue, and then manage to become essentially immortal. You won’t find many other books that discuss subjects such as * Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon THE LIGHTS IN THE TUNNEL / 240 The essential point I want to make is that all this truly amazing stuff will require enormous investment. Certainly, trillions of dollars will need to be invested in order to make such technologies a reality. As I have pointed out throughout this book, such investment cannot occur in the absence of robust consumer demand. Within the context of the free market economy, no investor would make such an investment unless he or she anticipates a vibrant market for the resulting technology. I would also argue that the level of automation I have been discussing in the book—in other words, the idea that a substantial fraction of routine, average jobs will be automated—represents a much lower point on the technology curve than all this really fantastic stuff. Therefore, it will occur first. As I have pointed out, if technology permanently eliminates huge numbers of workers—and creates pervasive fear in the minds of those who still have jobs— consumer demand would surely suffer dramatically. The bottom line is that, if our economic model is not adapted to the new reality, technology could essentially kill itself off. It is quite easy to imagine a scenario in which technology reached a certain point, but then slowed dramatically or even halted before getting to the really amazing things. advanced artificial intelligence and cybernetics—and also have plenty of recipes for healthy dishes. Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon Appendix / Final Thoughts / 241 Machine Intelligence and the Turing Test This book has primarily been concerned with the potential economic impact of what researchers in the field of artificial intelligence would call narrow AI. In other words, machines and software that are capable of sophisticated analysis, decision making and reasoning within a relatively narrowfield of application. Such machines are not really intelligent in any meaningful sense—but they are highly competent at performing specific complex tasks and may well exceed the capability of a human worker. Narrow AI applications are already in widespread use; expert systems such as the software that can autonomously pilot and land airliners and many of the advanced features built into Internet search engines and multiplayer role playing games fall into this area. Narrow AI is the practical side of artificial intelligence, and for that reason, we can expect that it will attract substantial commercial investment. As I have argued in this book, machines exhibiting vastly improved narrow AI capability may ultimately be poised to permanently take over a great many of the more routine jobs in the economy. While narrow AI is increasingly deployed to solve real world problems and attracts most of the current commercial interest, the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence is, of course, strong AI—the construction of a truly intelligent machine. The realization of strong AI would mean the existence of a machine that is genuinely competitive with, or perhaps even superior to, a human being in its ability to reason and conceive ideas. The arguments I have made in Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon THE LIGHTS IN THE TUNNEL / 242 this book do not depend on strong AI, but it is worth noting that if truly intelligent machines were built and became affordable, the trends I have predicted here would likely be amplified, and the economic impact would certainly be dramatic and might unfold in an accelerating fashion. Research into strong AI has suffered because of some overly optimistic predictions and expectations back in the 1980s—long before computer hardware was fast enough to make true machine intelligence feasible. When reality fell far short of the projections, focus and financial backing shifted away from research into strong AI. Nonetheless, there is evidence that the vastly superior performance and affordability of today’s processors is helping to revitalize the field. Research into strong AI can be roughly divided into two main approaches. The direct computational approach attempts to extend traditional, algorithmic computing into the realm of true intelligence. This involves the development of sophisticated software applications that exhibit general reasoning. A second approach begins by attempting to understand and then simulate the human brain. The Blue Brain Project,57 a collaboration between Switzerland’s EPFL (one of Europe’s top technical universities) and IBM, is one such effort to simulate the workings of the brain. Once researchers gain an understanding of the basic operating principles of the brain, it may be possible to build an artificial intelligence based on that framework. This would not be an exact replication of a human brain; instead, it would be something completely new, but based on a similar architecture. Copyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon Appendix / Final Thoughts / 243 When might strong AI become reality—if ever? I suspect that if you were to survey the top experts working in the field, you would get a fairly wide range of estimates. Optimists might say it will happen within the next 20 to 30 years. A more cautious group would place it 50 or more years in the future, and some might argue that it will never happen. True machine intelligence is an idea that, in many ways, intrudes into the realm of philosophy, and for some people, perhaps even religion. What is the nature of intelligence? Is intelligence algorithmic? Can it be separated from consciousness or self-awareness? Roger Penrose, one of the world’s top mathematical physicists, has written several books58 suggesting that true artificial intelligence is unattainable using conventional computers because he believes that intelligence (or at least consciousness) has its roots in quantum mechanics—the area of physics that governs the probabilistic, and seemingly bizarre, interactions that occur between particles of subatomic size. If strong AI does arrive, how will we know? That is a question that was first asked by Alan Turing nearly sixty years ago. Turing, a legendary British mathematician and code breaker during World War II, is often considered to be the founder of computer science. In 1950, Turing published a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which he proposed a test to answer the question: “Can machines think?” Turing’s test was based on a game popular at parties at the time. In today’s terms, it amounts to a three-way instant messaging conversation. One participant is a huCopyrighted Material – Paperback/Kindle available @ Amazon