Behold the new prosperity
For the past few thousand years there's been a big problem with human beings. They're just not very nice. To themselves. To each other. To the animals and plants. To the planet itself. But it seems that might be about to change. And maybe just in the nick of time.
What could change thousands of years of not nice into nice?
Artificial intelligence or "AI". Beginning with Alan Turing and his test for deciding when the "cognitive virtual machine" could fool us into thinking a machine was human, philosophers and scientists have been waiting for AI to graduate. To become truly proficient at being us.
It seems like we're there. Soon enough AI will be more than us in the ordinary world of beta consciousness work-for-a-living life. AI is going to rip the guts out of capitalism. The basic rule that you must sell your mind and body (in the form of labor) for money to stay alive is about to disappear, forcing billions of people who have been conditioned to accept the Puritans' first rule of life on earth, that "Those who do not work will not eat," into rethinking their place in the world.
It's fascinating to see news articles and online comments from people anticipating increased unemployment because of AI. It's as if they imagine society will remain structured as now, with most people employed and housed and fed, and a small percentage in rags, living in tents, begging. AI, they seem to think, will be just another bad thing for some people, but for most others, including them, it will be more or less business as usual.
This inability to recognize the scale of what's coming is reminiscent of studies showing that most humans cannot envision how much more money a billionaire has than they have. Using a football field metaphor, most people imagine they've got everything behind the 10 yard line, or maybe the 5 yard line, and the billionare the other 90-95 yards, when in truth the billionaire has the whole field but for your square millimeter no bigger than a sesame seed.
Likewise AI and what it will do to business as usual. AI is not any old wave crashing on the beach, it's a 500-foot tsunami that leaves cruise ships twenty miles inland. Wait until all or most corporate lawyers are replaced by AI. Same for journalists, doctors, bankers, software engineers. All the knowledge economy's past "winners." Wait until more than half the population has no way to "earn" a living because of AI, and yet, lo and behold, all those people still want to eat. And maybe they even have the audacity to believe they deserve to eat. How's that going to work out?
Seems like some new ideas are going to be needed. Soon. And those ideas are going to involve what it is to be human. For instance, what it means to feel and to have a soul and to care. And maybe, just maybe, under the most colossal pressure ever imagined, all these mean people, in other words, me and you and everyone else in our conditioned mind state, might wake up and start actually caring for ourselves, each other, the animals and plants, and the planet itself.
That's the cosmic purpose of AI. To make life very hard for a lot of people all at once in order to force a great coming together. Or at least the possibility of a great coming together. We'll see how it actually plays out.