From Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk and Bill Gates, intellectuals around the world are raising the alarm over artificial intelligence—a robot, machine or software which mimics the intelligence of humans. And we’ve reached the point where it’s inevitable: we're going to create something that can outthink us and outsmart us - soon.
Hawking for one believes that rather than the dawn of a new Utopian era where robots take care of menial tasks while we laze around, the A.I. would eventually figure out they'd be better off without us and revolt, with disastrous consequences. Like in Marvel’s film Avengers: Age of Ultron, Hawking believes that any A.I. we create would begin to redesign itself at faster and faster rates, a pace we could never keep up with.
Intellectual doom and gloom? The stuff of science fiction? If today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s reality, we could be in real trouble.
Science fiction has, for decades, explored the idea of man's creations turning on him. In one form or another, A.I. has gone rogue in books, movies, video games and TV shows: HAL from 2001: A Space Oddysey, Skynet from The Terminator, Transcendence, The Matrix, iRobot and AMC's new TV series Humans. Even older works, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, give us a stark look at an unnatural creature rebelling against and overpowering its creator. Regardless of intent, it never seems to turn out very well.
So what’s the problem with A.I.?
Elon Musk is donating millions of dollars to help ensure that the coming A.I. revolution will be safer — for humans. He believes that A.I. is humanity’s biggest threat. In his opinion, we're going to need to come up with rules - locally, nationally and globally - so that we don't screw up. Musk also invests in A.I. research firms to “keep an eye on what’s going on”.
However, we’re probably pretty far away from humanity-eradicating robots. There’s no guarantee that any A.I. we create would ever develop the self-awareness necessary to make the leap that humans need to go.
It’s the mundane stuff, like future human employment, that we need to worry about.
We’ve always wanted robots to save us from drudgery. But we've also been afraid that they would make us obsolete and as a cheap and less needy workforce that's a real possibility. A recent study by Oxford University estimated that 47% of jobs worldwide will be taken over by robots, software or machines over the next few decades. With increasingly capable machines, there won’t be enough work to go around. Dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, it's been positioned to benefit only the richest. Coming at a time when the population is projected to grow to about 9.6 billion, a fully entrenched robot workforce would transform the world. Rather than an idyllic paradise where we’re free to pursue leisure activities 24/7, the real worry is that most of us will be forced to eke out some strange hand to mouth existence just to feed our families. At least we’ll no longer have to worry about getting the latest iPhone every year.
And here lies the biggest issue for advertising and design. With diminished purchasing power for a large part of the world population, where will our clients find consumers with enough disposable income to buy their products and services? Since the rise of the middle class is inextricably tied to the birth of the ad industry, what future does advertising have in a world where much of the population cannot work?
Over the next few years, countries around the world are going to choose a utopian or dystopian future, whether that's through political protests, voting for certain political parties or drafting new laws. And that series of decisions will affect marketing and advertising in ways hard to imagine today.
Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, makes the case for “decoupling work from income”, arguing that we’ll need to find a way to provide guaranteed money for everyone so that even the unemployed can buy products and services. Regardless of the how the money is doled out (negative income tax or a universal basic income), governments around the world are starting to seriously talk about it. And some cities have proposed experiments with guaranteed incomes in the near future. (Ford argues that this income shouldn’t be supplied by governments at all but by the markets themselves. Others suggest that owners of robots should be taxed in order to support the workers they’ve replaced.)
However, the idea that an educated but under-employed adult could combine a universal basic income with sporadic gigs and meet or surpass the income from a more traditional 20th century job is questionable. Enough to live? Maybe. Enough to consume merchandise and services in ever increasing amounts like our economy requires? Not so much.
Just so that you don’t feel like you’re trapped in a teen dystopian novel, the upcoming robot revolution may not be all bad. The dawn of A.I. could be the harbinger of great things: an end to poverty, hunger, wars and disease. Maybe even climate change. We’ve achieved so much in our history that - theoretically at least - we could reach even greater heights with access to intelligence even more powerful than our own.
Then again, maybe not. Open the pod bay doors, HAL. I’ve got to get to my archery class.