Useless Eaters

A couple weeks ago I went to dinner with a friend who was concerned about the state of the world. In particular he wondered about the coming role of AI and how it might displace people from jobs. He even wondered whether it could do his job — though he had already put his two kids through college, presumably has plenty of savings and owns several rental properties. He wasn’t so much worried about himself, but what it would do the people he had employed over the years and millions like them.

I argued that in the early 20th century, people brought food into Manhattan presumably via horse and cart and were similarly displaced by truck drivers who could do the work of 10 carts. Technology improves over time, old ways of doing things are obsoleted and the demand for new work emerges in its place.

He was unpersuaded. Some of these people were in their 40s and 50s, and not exactly splitting the atom. Even if there were sufficient new jobs for them, how would they learn new skills? And AI wasn’t like the truck — an improvement in transport technology that might have displaced horse-and-cart drivers at a ratio of 10:1, but pervasive across all industry, all jobs. Instead of disrupting narrow industries, it could disrupt everything 100:1 or more. (He didn’t articulate it exactly this way, but I want to steel-man the argument.)

Let’s concede all this is true. That AI will displace many more jobs than it creates even though history’s many prior advances always led to demand for new and impossible-to-predict-because-they-didn’t-exist human-provided jobs and services. And let’s further stipulate that many people, as no doubt happened in history too, will be unable to adapt on the fly and fall on hard times.

In short, there will almost certainly be suffering, there is in fact already suffering, and there always has been suffering. Today’s many homeless people are, after all, just present versions of those you fear will be displaced by AI in the future. You don’t have to wait for AI — the consequences of people maladapted to society’s manifold rapid changes are already with us now.

The implicit question is what, if anything, we should do about it.

Rather than get into policy proposals — how much money should be diverted to what programs, what money should be taken from and given to whom and on whose authority — I want to examine the underlying and unstated premise: that there are people who, like children, cannot and will not be able to fend for themselves and must be protected and provided for by the everyone else. That accelerating technology will increasingly make these people obsolete, so to speak, as productive workers capable of adding value and contributing to society.

Because if these people were deemed capable of contributing and adding value rather than simply consuming, there would be no need to provide for them. Their contributions would be valued and compensated accordingly, and they would not need your help.

I want to emphasize what a significant assumption is being made about what is currently millions, and if my friend’s fears are valid, eventually billions of human beings that they are destined to become useless eaters, in the words of WEF spokesman, well-known author (and in my opinion sociopathic misanthrope) Yuval Harari.

In other words, this instinct to pity those who work for a living and deem them needing help from you hails from the same belief system as those who want to herd them into “video games and drugs” per Harari if and when their jobs go away. What to do about these recalcitrant children over whom we must watch, protect and ultimately divert into some activity/location where they can’t cause trouble for us?

Because once you buy into the “these people can’t contribute,” “have no economic value” and it’s only the collective pity of society that must keep them afloat, you are not far from a much darker solution that will grow in popularity and urgency if and when resources become more scarce.

So what’s the alternative to a dystopian society of “makers and takers” as private equity multimillionaire Mitt Romney once intoned on the campaign trail? How do we deal with all these “useless eaters” if not by providing for them?

For me the obvious first step is not to view your fellow human beings through that lens. To realize any adult human being is as much an authority and has as much agency as any other. You are not superior to a homeless person because they are presently in poor circumstances. You are not in charge of them, it is not up to you to dispense with them as you see fit — for the “greater good” or any other scheme or purpose you in your ignorance and human fallibility can conjure up.

Secondly, from time immemorial human beings have adapted to their environments in unimaginable ways. People who built the civilization we inherit, who settled rough and inhospitable lands, who of necessity invented and innovated everything from electricity to the Kantian Categorical Imperative: “Treat everyone as an end in himself.”

You simply have no idea of the extent to which other human beings are capable. A truck driver, with internet access, who cannot or will not figure out how to prompt AI in order to sit in a cubicle for some corporation might yet create something that changes humanity forever. If you don’t deem this plausible, consider a patent clerk with pen and paper came up with the Theory of Relativity.

Instead of trying to herd people into meaningless lives of dopamine generation (drugs and video games), an alternative is to see them as our ultimate resource, the only known repository of new ideas, creativity and genius on planet earth. To relegate your fellow man, created in God’s image, to some pathetic subsistence life to feel good about yourself is not just impractical — and as I said — leads down a dark path, but sinful, a wrong against nature or God, if you prefer.

Adaptation and suffering is how people become great. Not comfort, not pleasure, not pity, which is heads to judgment’s tails.

. . .

I’ll leave the policy proposals to the politicians. I suspect none of them will work, and you know this because none of them have ever worked. There are always homeless and destitute people, always those addicted to drugs, video games, junk food, the next dopamine hit, the next escape.

My view is once we view ourselves in the proper alignment, and “ourselves” includes our fellow man, we will create the necessary conditions for prosperity to the greatest extent practicable. We will build the structures and institutions that allow the creatures in God’s image to live up to it, and we will neither pity, nor judge, but empathize, and above all have the humility not to presume we know what’s best for them.