Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) accelerate, with a new tool allowing AI to do almost anything on a computer, learning to use Apps like humans do:
Open AI, the Ai lab backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has released “Universe,” a virtual world for AI to learn, which covers any software, everything that a human can do with a computer. Universe is thus a software platform, software for running other software, and in principle this will lead to AI being able to solve any problem, better than humans can do. This is early days yet, but that was so with facial and digital image representation previously.
A recent article in The Australian: “Future Shock: What Happens When Robots Take Our Jobs” (January 17, 2017, p. 9) discusses the idea of a universal income scheme for dealing with the “end of work” problem. A side bar discussion notes that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after scrapping two high-value bank notes which account for 86 percent of India’s currency by value, now wants to introduce a universal basic income which directly gives cash to India’s poorest. His goal is, apparently, to control corruption in India. India, after Russia, is the world’s second most unequal country, where the top 1 percent own 60 percent of the wealth. There is also support for universal income schemes in a number of European countries such as France and Finland:
The above article points out that the “money” will have to come from somewhere and where else could it come from but taxes, which is problematic because in the “end of work” scenario the tax base is reduced substantially, and of course, it is taboo to even contemplate taxing the 1 percenters. They are gods. Or even beyond the gods. Fuck, I am typing this on my knees in reverence of their majesty. Well, no, not really, just to avoid being seen by the black helicopter that just circled over my house.
Universal income schemes will not get off the ground, given conventional economics. Many, such as the Christian social credit movement, look for an alternative to all of this. Personally, I don’t think that they have a snowball’s chance up the Devil’s anal hole, because the Dark Lords of Finance would sooner burn the entire planet down than see even a few less zeroes on their computer balance sheets. They are, after all, the evillest force in the multiverse, making your neighborhood ax murderer look quite sane and friendly.
Thus, the future is likely to involve the elimination of the bulk of us. The only question is how they will finish us of? Will it be a pandemic? Or will killer robots and drones do the job? Decisions, decisions. It is a tough life being a Dark Lord.
