As long ago as 1984, in his Paths to Paradise, André Gorz, a self-proclaimed “revolutionary-reformist” stated, baldly, that the “micro-economic revolution heralds the abolition of work”. He even argued that “waged work . . . may cease to be a central preoccupation by the end of the century”. His timing was wrong. But serious analysts think he was directionally right. So what might a world of intelligent machines mean for humanity? Will human beings become as economically irrelevant as horses? If so, what will happen to our individual self-worth and the organisation of our societies?
In a remarkable recent lecture, Adair Turner, former chairman of the UK’s financial regulator and chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, addresses just these questions. He started from the assumption that intelligent machines will ultimately be able to perform most forms of current work better than people and at lower cost. This, he argues, is a question of when, not if. It will happen because of the progressive advance of processing power, the costless replicability of software and the rise of machine learning. Robot gods will make us all redundant.
Drawing on A Future that Works, a report published by the McKinsey Global Institute last year, Lord Turner adds that this future will not come evenly: some will be more affected far sooner than others. Moreover, even if intelligent machines cannot do every aspect of any given job, they can displace a great many workers.