Lo(a)st Job Gen
A What-if Essay
Mechanical minds have the potential to replace the last jobs left for humans to perform, what does that mean for the 7 billion whose probability of having job is decreasing rapidly? A graceful future where jobs will be a torturous faded memory.
As an Information Systems Operations Management major who once promised himself that he will make everyone in the world unemployable, it is my dream to transform humans from the largely replaceable nuts and bolts of our economic machine into a society living in an intelligent environment where individuals are free to pursue any realistic goals they have. Now the question is how do you design an intelligent environment which makes this utopia possible and how do we function as a society in a jobless world?
Let’s do the easy part first. Human technology is unfathomably rapid. It took humanity about 12,019 years from our first major construction job in the hills of Turkey to get to this point. Now we can race around the whole country of Turkey in a matter of hours in a car powered by literal waves of energy from a star we used to sacrifice human hearts to only five centuries ago. Some of us walk around with literal metal in our body, with electricity running through it and use it replace limbs or hear color. Just a few decades ago the only metal with electricity inside a human body was some elaborate torture gizmo inside Gaddafi’s basement. Basically, what I am trying to say in elaborate English is that we have broken the game with our collective intelligence. We have become so good at the game called survival of the fittest that we have decided not to even play it anymore instead we like to live in a world made of 1s and 0s perfectly built to keep us stimulated, and these 1s and 0s collectively have more intelligence than the doctor who brought our parents into this world. So, what does that mean for all the premed majors out there, I apologize to my girlfriend who is going to be slaving away for the next decade or so, but your work is pretty much worthless. On the Brightside almost all of our work is worthless. We have created artificial minds which are self-learning and self-improving, and oh yeah, they can make more artificial minds which are better than them in every way. Now fans of the robots-destroy-the-world genre will panic and say this AI thing is the end but if you believe an art student’s fantasy is reality then I encourage you to retreat from modern society and head to the jungles where natural selection can solve our problem. What reason would any artificial intelligence have to destroy the human species, all we really need carbon-based forms of energy, sleep, and stimulation. Besides other living things humans are pretty much safe from everything else in the grand scheme of things. So now what will this artificial intelligence do besides make everyone with a degree unemployable, well the highest probability is that it will slowly get integrated into the environment. Smart homes and cars are just the beginning. Imagine a world where no human works, robots collects, refine and distribute all resources, and we just do whatever we want. Get hungry? Just think about what you want to eat and the tree you are sitting under will open its trunk and voila your meal is all prepared and ready to be eaten or fed to you by a swarm of nanobots. Oh, and don’t worry, the tree is alive and breathing, it’s a lot easier to keep a plant alive with some technology than a human anyway. Feeling sick? Take a nice fresh breath in, nanobots will use this to enter your body and find out whatever superbug is infecting you and kill it so fast you would not even know that you had the small potential of wiping out humanity within you.
This future is possible due to every single bit of progress made throughout human history but primarily it has become realistic to be achieved within the next few decades due to advancements being made right now in machine learning and real time data analytics. I plan on joining this pioneering work very soon and do my part in making sure you either never get a job or get fired from one eventually. Trust me it’s a blessing, work sucks. But in a society where your job determines the worth of your very existence and money literally equals the value of your time how do we function in this jobless world?
Ok so the ideal first step in every unfamiliar situation is not to panic, but we are humans that’s kind of our thing. Yes, there will be a lot of politicians doing what they usually do — point fingers, yell, steal money, just some casual corruption with a bit of banter thrown in. Please be smart and do not believe a guy who earns his money by threatening to put you in jail. You are in college you should know better than to pick teams and go at each other’s throats. All sides are going to lose except for the bots who are more than happy to explore the universe and keep us alive for free. So how do we properly transition from a machine-like existence to a life of freedom. The key is education. Once the whole world is unemployable and freeloading off the work of robots, we will need to ensure that we exercise our brains regularly. Thus, education and active learning become key. Since at this point the concept of money will be useless, we will start teaching and learning from one another without any monetary barriers. It will be left to individuals to negotiate a medium of fulfillment. We have experts in almost every field, and we have so many curiosities but due to specialization most of us never had the time or energy to pursue all the many things which interest us. This pursuit of knowledge, the ultimate purpose of human existence, will become realized during this age of unemployment.
AI and machine learning are pushing us in a new age, I plan on being a captain on one of the first ships making my own waves in an unexplored ocean.
