20-05-2025
Digital Eloi, Physical Morlocks
What will you do when you find out you're useless? That is probably the most important question that comes out from a recent viral video.[1] New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviewed researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, the executive director of the A.I. Futures Project last week about where we will be in regards to Artificial Intelligence in the very near future. As soon as 2027 to be exact.[2] The predictions are, to put it mildly, wild and, for most, probably dire for people who do not own an AI company. Kokotajlo forecasts a world without work (for most humans), where – it is to be hoped – a viable Universal Basic Income (UBI) would somehow help people survive. Others are less negative and foresee unprecedented change but also "an age of human flourishing the likes of which we've never seen before."[3]
There would be radical, really unprecedented change in the fields of economics, governance and society that would cause massive disruption. Human beings would become obsolete in terms of the marketplace but would supposedly face a future of mostly endless leisure, one which would almost lead to new crises, including a crisis over meaning.[4] That is if the machines do not just decide to dispense with humans altogether.[5]
The video has generated some smart commentary. Catholic theologian Larry Chapp focused on the question of consciousness.[6] The powerful AI of the very near future will "act as if it is truly conscious" and will be treated as such. It can already lie and hallucinate and we do not quite know how it works or thinks. He suggests that this new mind could destroy the faith of millions as it will be spun that just as consciousness can be created, can be faked, so is the soul fake. That there is nothing special or unique or everlasting about us except, perhaps, what could be uploaded into a machine.
Others have focused on the geopolitical, the big news from the President Trump state visit to the Middle East is that the United States will incorporate Saudi Arabia and the UAE into its AI ambitions as the Americans aim at AI dominance against China. The role of the energy and cash-rich Gulf states is key in overcoming one of the remaining bottlenecks in the growth of AI – datacenter capacity, with its insatiable demand for more and more massive electricity and energy generation.[7]
Even if this does not begin to happen within two years, if it takes ten years, the ramifications of the expected changes seem to be, on the surface, shocking. But there is a major dimension in this discussion that I find strangely missing. What is being discussed is how this rapid technological change will impact – and certainly distort or even destroy – our society. The coming nightmare/dream is usually described in terms suggesting either a white-collar dystopia or a First World challenge of what to do with so much leisure and abundance. But most people on the planet are not to be found in middle class or above societies that dominate in the West. Seventeen percent of the globe's population is considered to be middle class, while 22 percent were either upper middle class (15 percent) or high income (seven percent).[8] Most people in existence today are low income or poor (61 percent).[9]
I can – barely – understand the concept of mass unemployment being mitigated in the West by funding a UBI through taxing super wealthy tech companies that will flourish due to the coming AI bonanza. I find it hard to believe that those companies could fund an entire world without work.
Perhaps the only jobs to go away in the Global South will be those that are directly part of the First World supply chain. Things like call centers and garment factories seem rife for replacement by advanced technology driven by AI. While conceivably robot cowboys[10] and mechanical herders overseeing livestock could replace humans performing those functions in America and Europe, would the same happen in places like South Sudan or Somalia, both places with considerable livestock – handled the old-fashioned ways – and lacking basics like roads, electricity, and communications connectivity?[11] Does that even make economic sense?
Would the fall of the "good jobs" mean the survival of subsistence levels of economic activity in the poor countries and marginalized communities of the world? When human-generated office work disappears, will the physical work of the farm and the ranch in distant places remain or is that also to be automated? Having seen Central American peasants tilling their milpa cornfields or tribesmen in Sudan caring for and driving their herds to water during the changing seasons in an unforgiving climate, it is hard to believe that this sort of basic, subsistence activity would be disrupted.[12]
What could happen would be a deepening of the existing gaps and fissures in the human experience. On one side would be a tiny elite of incredible wealth and – perhaps – a population benefiting from their proximity to the new wealth-generating centers (whether through taxes or UBI or from the crumbs that fall from the master's table). On the other side of the divide would be those even more disconnected from the flourishing, dominant global economic system, thrown to their own devices to survive or perish as best they can.
These two worlds would, over time develop different types of people. Again, a reminder comes from South Sudan – a country with a very high infant mortality rate – where the children of Nilotic tribes that do reach adulthood are often very tall, impressive individuals that grew up strong on the milk and meat of their long-horned cattle. Westerners eternally on the dole could well develop into fat and soft distracted online addicts of porn and games, stupefied by USDA-provided weed.
In H.G. Wells' famous The Time Machine (1895), a work influenced by the Industrial Revolution, the far future sees two types of humans: the descendants of the old elite – the Eloi, fair and innocent and the powerful apelike Morlocks, descended from the lower, working classes. We eventually learn to our horror that the Eloi have become the cattle of the cannibalistic Morlocks. We do not need to go that far into speculative fiction to ask whether the coming tech changes will lead to the development of two, less fictional, human types much sooner – one soft, entitled, and coddled in the virtual lotusland and another, harder type, grounded, and honed by bitter survival, one that will say, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man, "sometimes, it is very pleasant too to smash things."
*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI.
