Brave New World

 

Where I came in...

I was early into the computer revolution—1979. I was developing software soon after. I felt then that people did not recognize the significance of the desktop computer. It seemed to me this was a technological advance comparable to the invention of movable type—an improvement in the dissemination of knowledge that led to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Exploration, European dominance of the globe, the invention of empirical science, the general recognition of human rights, the collapse of feudalism, and democracy.

Then came the Internet and the World Wide Web. This was even bigger. Now I thought we were seeing an innovation comparable to the invention of writing. An improvement in the dissemination of knowledge that brought mankind out of the Stone Age into civilization.

But we were not done. Now we have, apparently, AI, something I did not think was possible. This seems comparable in its impact to the development of language itself. Which more or less marks the rise of the human as a being above the animals.

And these three new advances are happening within one lifetime. The first three took hundreds of thousands of years.

It is no surprise that the world seems to be in tumult. How could it not be? This is the most significant period in the history of the human race.

Here’s the good news: the average human life became hugely better with the discovery of language. Human life became incomparably better with the development of writing. Human life became incomparably better with the development of printing. We can assume that these innovations in turn will make life inconceivably better.

So it seems reasonable for Elon Musk to predict a time in the near future when we will all be wealthy, by current standards, perhaps without needing to work at all. The computer revolution and the internet revolution have already made many things that used to be expensive free or almost free; consider how many costly things your smartphone has replaced. 

If so, the spectre of pension funds running out of money is not real. We will have the ability to give everyone a pension, at any age. The government deficits we worry about may be buried in rapid GDP growth.

This means, in turn, that the recent drive by governments throughout the developed world towards mass immigration is gravely short-sighted. We will soon not need more people to do the work at lower skill levels, and will not need their taxes to fund government or pensions. The only factor limiting growth will be labour, but resources. While it may not be difficult to support a larger population, the disruption to the local culture and civil order would not be worth it.