Puppets or puppet-masters: who's in control of an automated economy?

If robots and AI are to run the economy, what does this mean for the power of individuals and governments?

© studiostoks / Adobe Stock

It’s been a while, but utopianism is once again en vogue. This latest brand of utopianism wasn’t dreamt up by socialists, hippies or ecologists. Instead, it comes to us from computer programmers and data scientists. This is a technological utopia sold to us as the logical conclusion of ever-increasing automation.

It is alleged that the rise of automation means humankind will become increasingly superfluous to the functioning of the economy. Governments will provide a universal basic income (UBI), potentially large enough to free us from having to pursue any paid work at all.

This technological utopia goes beyond the parallel talk of providing UBI as simple redistribution via the tax system. This is a future where the evolution of artificial intelligence and robotics are to liberate us from work. In this vision, UBI is the sharing out of the economic dividends of an automated economy. This automated economy would be a centrally-organised and planned economy powered by robots and AI producing everything we consumers need. We, the people, would reap the benefits of this automated economy because government would tax the robots and dole out a basic income to the masses.

Although there are reasons to believe any destruction of jobs by automation might actually create entirely new industries or increase the relative value of existing service industries, for the purposes of this article let’s take it as true that robots will put most or all of us out of work.

What will Alice do once the last job on earth has been automated?

An automated economy providing for all certainly sounds appealing. However, centralised, planned economies do have a somewhat chequered history. All previous attempts at planned economies have ended in disaster leading to falling earnings, technological stagnation, shorter life expectancy, abuses of power and the losses of liberties. Think Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, North Korea, Cambodia, Venezuela, and so on.

A cheap shot, you might feel, comparing a future AI revolution to the gross failures of Stalin and Mao. But if it is to succeed, a future automated economy would have to find solutions to many of the problems that plagued all experiments in planned economies. Let’s start with the information problem.

The information problem occurs because governments never have enough information to be able to successfully plan an economy from the centre; no one knows your wants and needs better than yourself. Are we suggesting that an AI-revolution will solve the information problem? One way to achieve this might be to give up incredibly detailed personal data in real-time to the AI that run the economy. This may appeal to some, but to many it would look like a dystopia of consumers enthralled to corporations.

Giving up information takes us to a second problem. We are living in the information age. Data is power. Giving up your data therefore means giving up power.

Dreams about the future automated economy necessarily require us to relinquish considerable control to the robots; control about what products are sold, control about how they are produced, and control about how they are marketed. AI may even do something we would consider immoral such as ignore servicing unprofitable markets such as the disabled or those with drug and alcohol problems.

If the robots are handed this power, then is their someone/something ultimately in charge of them? There appear to be two options:

1. The robots are pretty clever but are ultimately under the control of, and can be edited by, their programmers.
2. The robots become sentient and are now independent from their human designers.

Option 2 puts us in unknown territory — no one can predict what decisions the robots would consider “optimal”. Your liberty, and possibly your safety, could be very much at risk. Let’s assume this wouldn’t be implemented.

Option 1 would place an elite of managers, engineers and programmers in control over the robots that run our society. At this point, note who are some of the loudest supporters of UBI: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and other darlings of Silicon Valley. What kind of future are these tech giants imagining for us? Could robots managed by a micro-class of the mega-rich be trusted to take care of all of society’s needs?

A third problem centres around the effect the automated economy could have on our personal freedoms. Providing a basic income to all is often claimed to promote entrepreneurialism, but once the economy is fully-automated (like Alice’s world in the video above), would humans even be allowed to start their own business? Or would the AI decide humans were simply a source of inefficiency?

What other activities would the robots (or their designers) decide were “bad for the economy”, and therefore should be discouraged or perhaps even suppressed? Perhaps art becomes a waste of resources, rest an unnecessary luxury and freedom of expression a dangerous distraction?

Making robots answerable to democracy

High levels of automation in the economy has the potential to be to the benefit of all. Who knows — UBI might even work. But these are still very new ideas, and we need to think carefully to avoid the kinds of problems I’ve listed above. At the risk of egg-on-my-face, I think such a future is quite a few years off, so there is plenty of time to come up with solutions.

What’s almost certain is that an automated economy would involve a transfer of power from both individuals and governments into the hands of private enterprise, they being the owners of the software and machines. This transfer of power should only take place in a world where we are sure that corporations are accountable to both government and the people.

Some call for “fully-automated luxury communism”, including, ironically, Venezuela (Telesur is the government mouthpiece), where if you use the words “luxury” and “communism” in the same sentence someone will, at best, laugh at you. A real solution to the problems thrown up by automation will, of course, be more complex, and will successfully balance the powers of the state, corporations, individuals…and our future robot colleagues.

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