AIs are Coming for You & Your Job

I have for some time been writing books in a series called Join the Girls. I’m currently in the midst of writing volume 18. The series was meant to be based around eroticism. That wasn’t my choice, but my friend Ruth said I was good at that sort of writing, and she pestered me to do something about it. In the end, to get started I simply wrote a book about my life in my early teens when I lived in a hamlet in the English Home Counties where I was the only boy among five girls. To put the content of volume one in a nutshell, they treated me like a live doll or a sex object.

Sounds wonderful I’ve no doubt, and in part it was. But it was also terribly one-sided, and I was made to realise I had no rights, no will of my own, and was to all intents and purposes some sort of slave to put up with whatever the girls decided upon.

Naturally I viewed them with a mixture of irritation and adoration, and I found I fell in love with them all over again while writing the series, which took the gang forward into adulthood, and business success.

Here’s a link to the series page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BVRPTT4Z

There is a point to all this as one of the later novels in the series was intended to broach the subject of AIs.

Back in 2010 or thereabouts when Ruth first charged me with this mission I was interested in the development of androids. In fact, back when I was writing songs for my band during the seventies I came up with a song called Electric Mac, which was all about people using wearable computers. We still dont have anything remotely like what I envisaged, or even what MIT was producing during the nineties.

When I’m closer to finishing volume 18 I will introduce you to a couple of the songs from the album I created with my son, so you can see how I was thinking about such things way back then.

However, with the sudden surge in interest in AIs last year I decided that maybe waiting for me to get round to publishing all the previous seventeen of the series of novels it might be a good idea to climb on the bandwagon and publish that later book where my gang of characters experiment with bringing sophisticated androids in to do the housework, and take things from there.

I wanted to work through the idea of how one could relate to androids. Could they start to rival relationships with humans?

In this respect Julie introduced me to a program on tv back in the nineties. At least I think it was that far back. Time seems to take on a certain elasticity after a while. The program was called No Sex Please, We’re Japanese. I was rocked to my boots when the female presenter was questioning a couple of Japanese guys about their use of gaming and avatar friends.

Her question was very simple. “Who do you prefer, your wife or your avatar friend?”

You’d think that was a simple question, and easy to answer. But there was a long silence while the guys had to think, and if I remember rightly, they weren’t sure of the answer.

That was a generation or so back, which is a long time in terms of technology. What would an AI powered android these days look and behave like? It would surely be a lot more sophisticated. Are we narrowing the gap between humans and machines?

In one sense the gap has gone the other way. AIs are already far cleverer than humans. They have an inbuilt knowledge base that humans have access to, but that access is external. We have to go and find it, and we cant possibly scan it and imbibe it at  the speed an AI can. That means an AI can outperform a human being at most tasks.

There is currently a question mark concerning whether AIs can create things, but I’m not at all sure that area will hold out for much longer. In other words humans are on the verge of being made redundant.

Let’s hang on to that idea, but move on to a slightly different consequence.

The latest volume in my series is called The AI Girl, and is coming along nicely, and tries to explore how a more modern relationship with a top of the range android might develop. In other words, would an android be too clever and sophisticated for the average human? I’m looking at whether we have a similar question arising along the lines of the Turing Test. The Clare Test is rather more stringent. How long before you would be unable to tell whether your companion was a real human or a rather sophisticated android?

Of course, in the book, the girls complain when the guy brings this AI into the household, and she looks rather sweet and attractive. In short, all hell breaks loose, and in the end one of the girls retaliates by electrocuting the AI.

This of course raises a question. It not only becomes a matter of whether the AI is human, but are humans now revealed as really very sophisticated machines, and we are getting very close to being able to make alternative humans? If so, since they are in many respects superior to ourselves, are we close to making ourselves redundant?

At this stage I am not going to launch into an intricate philosophical discussion concerning our ability to liaise with androids, or whether indeed we are machines, and whether we can uncover the secret of vitality in the near future. Instead I want to project forward this whole business of AIs and whether they will make humans redundant. In particular, going forward, what purpose will human beings serve? Will they just live off the androids? But if the androids are really more intelligent than humans, will they just turn round and get rid of the humans?

Weighty questions indeed. But let’s not go quite that far for the moment. More to the point, if 90% of the population is about to be made redundant, what does that 90% do with their lives, and will the remaining 10% decide that those hangers-on need to be liquidated? Maybe that’s a question for the 2050’s, but surely there are looming questions for the next decade. How are over-populated countries going to survive? How is a world run by AIs requiring energy as food going to survive with a green agenda? And how is a welfare state going to cope with supporting an unproductive army of people who are not contributing to the general wealth?

This question of the proliferation and modernisation of AIs is going to start affecting our lives and our social structures very quickly. One colleague I was talking to the other day said we probably have about five years to adjust to a new and very different reality. Whether that turns out to be true or not I cant tell. But it is certainly possible. I would certainly think it possible that the next decade will not be much like this one. That isn’t very far away. Are we prepared for a new approach to life? Somehow I think not. Maybe we need to wake up.

What I am getting at here is that in the very near future things are going to be very different. There is no sense in analysing the world on the basis of old fashioned assumptions.

I still note that many people who have not grasped that the world is changing are still saying that countries with declining populations are heading for big trouble. No. In a world where AIs can be created to do 90% of the things we humans have previously been doing, the countries that are going to be in the best position going forward are those with small and decreasing populations. In ten years time what are heavily populated countries going to do with all those people? They are going to find themselves in serious trouble. What are all those unemployed going to do? Who is going to support them? And what trouble are legions of unproductive and unused people going to cause to the social fabric of society?

Over the course of the next few blogs I want to pursue this aspect of the very near future, and see if we can equip ourselves with a set of thoughts that might prove productive when trying to plan a way forward.