Before becoming the world’s most hated oligarch, Elon Musk was at the cutting edge of some very civic-minded technologies: renewable energy storage to combat climate change, launching 7,000 satellites to bring the information age to developing countries, building mind/machine interfaces so people can parse vastly more of that information.
He even said, shortly before he became mega-MAGA, that the recent boom in artificial intelligence will render jobs obsolete, so the world will need a very “high” universal basic income. UBI? That’s socialism! The world’s No. 1 capitalist and enemy of empathy actually endorsed giving people money for nothing.
Around that time, Trump’s enduring success with “the poorly educated” he “loved” might have prompted Musk to think people might actually be frightened the future he envisions. So, he went from progressive to populist and started attacking that oppressor we all love to hate: our government. Which is also the thing that protects the poorly educated from tech bros like Musk who “move fast and break things.”
Granted, this guy only speaks in hyperbole these days, so taking any one statement from his firehose of opinions risks exaggeration. But Musk’s concern over mass unemployment in a world being technologically and digitally transformed is widespread for a reason.
For 17 years, my job involved getting a working understanding of how information flowed through every imaginable enterprise and how software is automating that process. I would then produce articles a six-year-old could understand, proclaiming the profound power of this software to save time and money.
I interviewed church secretaries and non-profit executives; car battery and tire recyclers; pet-groomers and shipping executives; HR directors and doctors. Let’s not forget our beloved bureaucrats at every level of government in every country.
These are the credentials I cite in saying Musk is correct. Computer automation will bring job elimination on a scale unimaginable to anyone who thinks the current president is going to Make America Great Again by bringing back jobs computers do far faster, better, and more affordably.
Unfortunately, when I try to make this argument to those with even a passing understanding of the subject, I’m hit with the same reply: I’m a Luddite who doesn’t realize that every technological enhancement to workplace productivity only opens other avenues of opportunity for ever more productivity for ever more people.
Leaving aside for now the more existential questions about what exactly is being produced, and why we need more, let’s just focus on automation. Outside of our own jobs, we are all much more interested in products than their production, as the latter is excruciatingly boring to anyone not doing it.
Yet, production, aka our jobs, defines humanity at least as much as art, love, family, and all the other things we desperately cite when distancing ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom. It comprises half or more of our existence, and it’s all being automated. Not just for one product, all products. How do you make Joe-the-Plumber and Soccer Mom embrace this brave new world?
This is why the remark from Musk struck me so. Universal basic income may be antithetical to the country’s work ethic, but it is the only means of addressing humanity’s basic needs once automation renders our cogs unnecessary in the machinery of life.
The countless impediments to automation that lie in the centuries of siloed information stored in filing cabinets and libraries the world over are coming down. Fast. When you add artificial intelligence into the mix, this digital transformation of so much of our raison d’etre will hit warp speed.
And what is the leader of the free world doing to prepare for this unemployment apocalypse? Making damn sure the proceeds for all that increased productivity go into as few pockets as possible. It’s “Soylent Green” meets “The Matrix.”
Sure, the theft of decades of public contribution to building government agencies that are now being stripped down and sold for spare parts to Trump’s friends pisses me off royally. But destroying those agencies as we hurtle headlong into mass unemployment of the very people who ushered in this madness without any provision for their well-being is going to piss off a lot of people.