A widely-discussed problem with full automation of the economy is that, in a world where AI can do everything better, people might have trouble feeling like anything they could do is meaningful. What could we do with our time that would be fulfilling?
A standard answer is that we'd play games, in Bernard Suits's sense (if you haven't read Suits, his paper Games and Utopia: Posthumous Reflections gives the key beats and is delightful, or C. Thi Nguyen has many talks where he explains the basic idea). A game, for Suits, is "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." And since, under full automation, basically all obstacles would be unnecessary, any that we still chose to overcome would be, in effect, games. We could still build houses, engage in scientific research, and all sorts of things, as a form of play (and of course the usual kinds of games like chess, soccer, and TES V: Skyrim would count as well).
But there's also a worry, one that Suits grapples with a lot: people have a need to be needed. They want to provide value to other people, and pure games don't supply that.
I think there's a potential solution to this, and it comes from a different worry about automation: collective deskilling. Imagine that AIs do all the surgery, all the mathematics, and so on. After a generation or two with no human mathematicians, there's nobody alive to teach the next generation. Humanity could lose the ability to even understand the math the machines are doing. And more importantly, they could lose the ability to keep it going if the machines went away.
And the machines could go away. If we rely on them for everything, they become a single point of failure; our civilization becomes even more vulnerable than it already is to any shock that deprives us of them.
So, here's the idea: these two problems partly cancel each other out. It might be worthwhile to learn these skills precisely in order to stave off collective deskilling: to keep the human tradition of doing them alive as a civilizational safety net. People might pick a specialty and train in it, even learning from the machines, but make it a point of pride to be as good as they could be unassisted. Then, even though they would never be as good as the machines, they'd be able to step in if we ever lost the machines. This itself could be a valued social role to play. "Mathematician," "doctor" and so on would survive as social identities, sources of pride and status.
These would still be games, but games with a social function: doing math without the machine is still "overcoming an unnecessary obstacle," but in service of a valued social function: keeping the skill alive. A nice turn of phrase from Fable:
The need to be needed gets met by being the reserve.
A widely-discussed problem with full automation of the economy is that, in a world where AI can do everything better, people might have trouble feeling like anything they could do is meaningful. What could we do with our time that would be fulfilling?
A standard answer is that we'd play games, in Bernard Suits's sense (if you haven't read Suits, his paper Games and Utopia: Posthumous Reflections gives the key beats and is delightful, or C. Thi Nguyen has many talks where he explains the basic idea). A game, for Suits, is "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." And since, under full automation, basically all obstacles would be unnecessary, any that we still chose to overcome would be, in effect, games. We could still build houses, engage in scientific research, and all sorts of things, as a form of play (and of course the usual kinds of games like chess, soccer, and TES V: Skyrim would count as well).
But there's also a worry, one that Suits grapples with a lot: people have a need to be needed. They want to provide value to other people, and pure games don't supply that.
I think there's a potential solution to this, and it comes from a different worry about automation: collective deskilling. Imagine that AIs do all the surgery, all the mathematics, and so on. After a generation or two with no human mathematicians, there's nobody alive to teach the next generation. Humanity could lose the ability to even understand the math the machines are doing. And more importantly, they could lose the ability to keep it going if the machines went away.
And the machines could go away. If we rely on them for everything, they become a single point of failure; our civilization becomes even more vulnerable than it already is to any shock that deprives us of them.
So, here's the idea: these two problems partly cancel each other out. It might be worthwhile to learn these skills precisely in order to stave off collective deskilling: to keep the human tradition of doing them alive as a civilizational safety net. People might pick a specialty and train in it, even learning from the machines, but make it a point of pride to be as good as they could be unassisted. Then, even though they would never be as good as the machines, they'd be able to step in if we ever lost the machines. This itself could be a valued social role to play. "Mathematician," "doctor" and so on would survive as social identities, sources of pride and status.
These would still be games, but games with a social function: doing math without the machine is still "overcoming an unnecessary obstacle," but in service of a valued social function: keeping the skill alive. A nice turn of phrase from Fable:
The need to be needed gets met by being the reserve.