Promise of Early Retirement: from J Storrs Hall

When Josh Hall talks about early retirement, he is referring to the retirement of all humans from work. Why should all humans retire? Because cheap human-equivalent machines will do all the work humans once did, for the price of kilowatt hours of electricity -- pennies. Josh is a very bright man, a creative man who is able to dream great dreams, and also crunch the numbers: a rare combination. Here is what he says about the retirement of the race:

If you have a human-level AI based on computer technology, the cost to do what it can do will begin to decline at Moore’s Law rates. Even if an AI costs a million dollars in, say, 2020, it’ll be a thousand in 2030 and one dollar in 2040 (give or take a decade). Why hire a human when you can buy the equivalent for a dollar? To put it as simply as possible, you aren’t going to be able to make a living by working. You’re going to need to have some capital. Everybody’s going to need some capital.

...One way or the other, the human race is going to take an early retirement in the next few decades. I find this a much better way of thinking about what’s coming up than “singularity”. The term “singularity” was specifically created to reflect a notion that there was an event horizon associated with advancing AI. But whether or not this is true of the far future, some distinct profiles of the near future are clearly visible. And from what we can see of it, it is going to make a huge difference what we do now.

So, I think, we need a better term than “singularity” to describe what’s coming up. It should reflect the fact that there are indeed some things we can tell about what will be happening. It should, if possible, reflect the fact that this will be a major liberating event for the human race — no longer need we spend our lives in forced drudgery, since we have built machines to do the necessary work. But it should also reflect the fact that we need to be planning for it. _JSHall

Josh is trying to explain how things will change in the near future. It is an optimistic vision, overall, which fits well with "The Europe Syndrome" described by Charles Murray. Thousands of extropians, transhumanists, and singularitarians have described similar technological "quasi-utopias" for well over 50 years. It is a vision suited for lulling the masses to sleep.

Machines have certainly removed much drudgery from the lives of women and men. Our dozens of energy slaves have given us more leisure, income, and choices than pre-industrial humans possessed. It is only natural to extrapolate this trend into the future, to the expectation of early retirement for the race of men. Natural, but wrong.

Western culture no longer speaks for the entire world -- if it ever did. The economic and demographic problems of the west are show stoppers for the "inevitable march of the singularity." But the greater underlying problem for the western world besides the fact that its people are dying without replacement, and its over-consumptive lifestyle is destroying the wealth of future generations -- is the spiritual vacuity. NOT IN A RELIGIOUS SENSE. Religion does not truly signify, once one probes the depths of the human brain, and understands what human spirituality actually is. The human spirit is what makes humans strive against insurmountable obstacles, and prevail.

While western man may have lost his "soul" in a poker game, or used it as collateral for a loan spent on mere consumption, the rest of the world -- most of the world -- has not done the same. Most of the world is still driven to strive, to reproduce, to survive at all costs. To that end, ancient myths of religion and spirit are called upon to guide and motivate the masses to follow traditional paths.

Affluence has stopped the population growth of western populations. But affluence is not a sure thing. Not for the west, and certainly not for the rest. Differential birth rates of east and west, north and south, favour the ever-burgeoning masses of third world people and the traditional tribal peoples of myth and Islam.

Westerners are certainly dying off -- the victims of their own affluence and lack of depth. At the same time, a few scientists and engineers working within mainly western research institutions and corporate labs are creating incredible new technologies that would certainly change any world into which they were introduced.

Third worlders are not dying off, and are instead procreating at 1.5, 2, 3, 4 times replacement, depending upon the country. Population IQ is inversely proportional to fertility rates, roughly speaking. But even low IQ people can watch satellite TV and covet the powerful toys and energy slaves that the rich westerners possess.

These toys and slaves do not maintain, repair, and manufacture themselves -- not yet. But what happens when the small cadres of scientists and engineers, working within institutions inside the dying lands, create the machines that Josh Hall talks about above? Machines that can create, maintain, repair, and improve upon other machines without the help of moderately intelligent and skilled humans? At that point, even after the west dies off, some parts of the low IQ third world can still have high tech societies. And within the sea of low IQ societies, we find islands of higher IQ sub-populations that can step in to profit from the high tech : low IQ dynamic.

Of course, in the style of a true Idiocracy, such inherited toys, slaves, and intelligent mind surrogates will be largely neglected, frittered, fought over, and intentionally destroyed as "evil." Human nature does not disappear, and history does not end -- regardless of how many Fukuyamas or other well intentioned intellectuals proclaim it. Instead, the Fukuyamas meet the end predicted by JM Keynes, "in the long run ..."

Predicting the future is much harder than most people understand. Everything you think you know . . . . just ain't so.