[p2p-research] Approach to Singularity

[Ryan]

Unemployment and the singularity.

Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Approach to Singularity via
Early Warning by Stuart Staniford on 6/28/10
This post is an attempt to think through the economic and political
implications of the approaching singularity. As such, it's necessarily
highly speculative - caveat lector. Let's start with the graph above
(from this post, with an additional annotation). It shows (in black)
linear and quadratic extrapolations of the male employment/population
ratio, along with the yellow dot showing a conjecture that at a true
singularity (machines smarter than humans in all important respects),
nobody would be employed, along with Kurzweil's estimate of the
singularity date (which is based roughly on extrapolating Moore's Law
and assuming that soon after computers exceed the processing capacity
of the human brain, we will know how to simulate human intelligence,
and then improve on it).

My suspicion is that the truth is somewhere in between and the purple
curve shows one possible guess (and it's no more than that). The
general idea is that the organizing principles of intelligent thought
will prove harder to crack than just producing the raw computing power,
but on the other hand, several orders of magnitude of more Moore's law
will be more dramatically transformative than the trend in the
employment/population ratio to date would indicate. Additionally, of
course, we will have the ongoing effects of China, India, etc, bringing
a larger and larger fraction of their populations into the modern era,
and this will have a depressing effect on US employment for several
more decades (either we let our corporations continue to outsource to
those countries, or we'll find our corporations put out of business by
lower cost competitors, or we'll impose major trade barriers and invite
corresponding retaliation, and any which way, it will tend to put
pressure on US employment).

Now it seems clear that this trend is not going to run uninterrupted to
zero in a democratic society. Other things being equal, machine
intelligence has overwhelming economic advantages - the possibility of
being readily specialized to task, the willingness to work night and
day without demanding resource-intensive houses and cars in
compensation, ability to be replicated exactly, etc, etc. However,
people have an overwhelming political advantage - they can vote, and
machines can't.

I expect in the short term (next decade or two), what we will see is an
intensification of the trends of recent decades:


- Life will get better for most people in the upper class and upper
half of the middle class. If you have a lot of assets, or a creative
and intellectually challenging job, the technology will enable you and
make your life better and provide you with cool toys and entertainment
options. There will be increasing demand for your skills, and
employment will not be a problem.
- In the lower half of the income/class spectrum, life will get
steadily grimmer. There will be fewer jobs suited to your skills and
abilities, and competition for the ones that there are will be intense.
More and more people will fall out of the system and have to find
alternative ways to survive (welfare, crime, institutionalization,
disability, relying on family/friends, etc, etc).
- Competition for educational opportunities will become increasingly
high-stakes, as education becomes more and more critical to have a
chance at fitting into the system in a reasonably high-status way.
- Overall, psychological stress in the society will gradually increase.
- The basic assumptions of our culture - that status is associated with
having income/assets, that hard work is good, that people living off
some form of welfare are second-class citizens, that innovation is
good, will not be widely challenged initially.As long as things are
getting better for society's elite (who control all the important
social and economic institutions), they will certainly desire to
preserve the existing order and the existing cultural rules.

However, as times goes on, and as computer intelligence continues to
get better and better and displace more and more people from the
workforce, it seems that there will be fertile ground for political
movements to address the situation. I see several issues that will
build over time:

- The more-or-less unemployed underclass will get larger, is unlikely
to be very content, and is potentially available to be recruited into
political movements for change.
- Members of the elite will increasingly recognize the nature of the
process, and realize that even though they are doing great, their
children's future is at risk.The question then becomes - what should
such future political/cultural movements propose to do?

I assume that, with the exception of a few fairly bizarre computer
scientists, most people do not wish to be functionally replaced with
machines. I also assume that modifying people themselves to make them
smarter will prove much less tractable than just making better machines
(it involves brain surgery, long clinical trials to establish
safety/efficacy, etc, all of which will make the product lifecycle
turnover much slower than new computer chips or software versions, and
at the end of the day, the pure machine is always going to be willing
to work for cheaper, since no-one is going to build into it the desire
for a big house in the suburbs and a fast car).

So people are, ultimately, going to want to preserve a human-dominated
society, but clearly that is going to mean that, one way or another, at
some point, we will have to agree to stop developing ever smarter
computers.
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