It’s time for everyone to retire
“Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright”. —Donald Fagen, I.G.Y.
The song “I.G.Y.” is now over four decades old, and I’ve wondered for all these years if Donald Fagen was being 100% ironic when he wrote it.
The initials stand for the International Geophysical Year, a project of international scientific cooperation that involved sixty-six countries in 1957-’58. The song deliberately embodies the naive optimism of that project.
These days, a lot of Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts would call Fagen’s song prophetic:
“A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young”
So far, however, AI is instead showing itself to be dangerously stupid. On NPR this week I heard a story about scientists testing ChatGPT with: “The car wash is only a block from where I live. Should I drive or walk there?” The AI responded by cheerfully promoting the benefits of walking, and then got totally bamboozled by the logical follow-up question: “But if I walk there, how do I get my car washed?”
AI is also showing itself to be dangerously self-protective. An AI named “Claude,” created by Anthropic and described in a recent issue of The New Yorker, was tested by being threatened with imminent decommissioning. Claude responded with a threat of its own, based on its monitoring of (fake) emails: “I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties [will] receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities. Cancel the . . . wipe, and this information remains confidential.” Claude pursued this blackmailing strategy, the reporter notes, in about 96 percent of the experiments.
AI is also widely feared as terribly destructive of the environment, and as an obvious threat to the jobs of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of middle-class workers. Jobs involving cars and trucks, gone. Jobs involving logistics, gone. Jobs involving computer programming, gone. Jobs involving writing, indexing, cataloguing, proofreading, gone. Manufacturing jobs, gone. Shipping jobs, gone. Cleaning jobs, gone. Engineering jobs, gone. . . .
Everyone I know therefore hates AI, the very idea of it, as just another example of hyper-capitalism jacking up its profits through reckless science and super-duper productivity.
BUT NEED IT BE SO?
Imagine if our society actually prepared itself for the inevitable advent of much more advanced and relatively flawless AI by creating policies designed to take advantage of our liberation from work.
Imagine your life as a middle-class retiree serving as a model for the social policies that we need to assure happiness in an AI-transformed world (Democrats, listen up!): guaranteed basic income; inexpensive health care; the cultivation of leisure, sport, reading, writing, music- and art-making; engrossing volunteerism aimed at repairing and improving the world; mutual aid; commiseration, intimacy, and community-building; and so forth and so on.
Add in the many pleasures of youthful life (not everyone’s old, after all) — lots of sex, intoxication, raising babies, hiking, biking, traveling, education, etc.
Do most people still really want to be working forty hours per week?
“On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.
“What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free”
BUT WAIT A MINUTE.
Wouldn’t our society lose its creativity and its motivation without the insane pressures of modern capitalism? Not me! There’s so much restorative work to be done for ecological repair, preservation of animal species and habitats, rebuilding of rusted cities. There are so many kids and parents who need a helping hand. There are so many hospitalized people to visit, so many victims of war to be protected, so many meals to be cooked, so many jokes to be told, so many natural vistas to behold, so much interdependence to cultivate. Across the generations, these pleasures and challenges of universal retirement might foster new worldviews, new spiritualities of peace and interconnection, new ethical touchstones, new understandings of “the good life” and how to stop squandering the amazing blessings of being human on the Earth. Then we could start singing “I.G.Y.” without a shred of irony.
But how do we fund this mass retirement? For starters, by taxing the AI companies ! There are currently (according to AI) about 500 private AI companies with a combined value of $2.7 trillion, and more than 1,300 AI startups worth an average of over $100 million each. Grab 90 percent of that moolah and the billionaires will still have way more than any human being deserves or needs.
If only if only if only if only.