Wall-E Meets Walden
David Barnhizer
Elon Musk recently wrote that AI/Robotics could supplant all humans in the workforce and that humans would be all very well off and living in a modern version of the Garden of Eden. Given his incredible list of accomplishments, I have great regard for Musk, including all the quirks, off-the-wall observations, and just being “different” from what might be thought of as the “cowed herd” or obedient “sheep” that we are becoming. Whatever else he is, Musk is not boring. He provides a continual flow of fresh intellectual, economic, and political “air” to a world dismayingly full of shysters, liars, predators, and pretty stupid people.
What Musk said was:
[A]rtificial intelligence will take all our jobs and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Probably none of us will have a job,” Musk said about AI at a tech conference on Thursday. … Musk described a future where jobs would be “optional.” “If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job,” Musk said. “But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.” … “There would be no shortage of goods or services,” he said.
For this scenario to work, he said, there would need to be “universal high income” – not to be confused with universal basic income, although he did not share what that could look like. (UBI refers to the government giving a certain amount of money to everyone regardless of how much they earn.) https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/23/tech/elon-musk-ai-your-job/index.html#:~:text=Elon Musk says artificial intelligence,a tech conference on Thursday. “Elon Musk says AI will take all our jobs”, Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN, 5/23/24.
As AI technology continues to evolve, our future could become a tragic witness to the demise of the human race in terms of whether there is any reason for our continuing existence. It would be a future fairly characterized as one in which the thematics of the Disney movie Wall-E came down to Earth in real time. As in Wall-E, where an apocalypse sent humanity into orbiting space stations after the earth became uninhabitable, humans will be super-obese “blobby” creatures riding around in motorized carts, sitting in an AI Virtual Reality pod, or wasting away in some other modern version of an “opium den” or sloshed on bad tequila and rum in Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”. http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2015/10/06/fda-oxycontin-heroin-opioid-addiction-crisis. Tom Ashbrook, “American Opioid Addiction Keeps Growing: “American addiction. From prescription painkillers to heroin. The numbers are staggering. Why?” 10/6/15.
But this future is not a cartoon. The “spaced” remnants of the human race will become flaccid from inactivity and likely to die much earlier than physically necessary. But they will be exchanging their physical longevity for electronic lives that would presumably be more satisfying to hundreds of millions of people even if entirely artificial and pointless. Depressingly, we seem to be making our way to some version of developing into the deteriorated humans of Wall-E. One example is represented by a stunning report predicting that 57% of Americans will be obese by the age of thirty-five. And this trend is affecting our children, millions of whom spend their time sitting inertly while addicted to their games and computer screens. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/30/more-than-half-of-american-children-set-to-be-obese-by-age-35-study-finds. “More than half of American children set to be obese by age 35, study finds: Harvard researchers predict 57% of children will grow up obese”, Jessica Glenza, 11/30/17.
As human employment disappears, addictions will continue to rise and intensify, while people are “made useless” and unfocused. The stimulus supplied by “real” reality will be so much less than that of the fantasy lives people will be living. Many people will opt out of this plane of existence and become “heroes” in a virtual world they can control. Already we are seeing a version of this “unreality” in the rapid development of “sexbots” that can be designed to look like a star of your choosing and that will do anything demanded. In that world you can be loved by a “god” or “goddess”, complete with tactile and sensory inputs. In one sense this is the electronic version of the “blow up sex dolls” people often joked about. https://www.forbes.com/sites/reenitadas/2017/07/17/goodbye-loneliness-hello-sexbots-how-can-robots-transform-human-sex/2/#3b85a22962e3. “Goodbye Loneliness, Hello Sexbots! How Can Robots Transform Human Sex?”, Reenita Das, 7/17/17.
Millions among the human population will seek refuge from the malaise of purposeless existence. With no employment available or necessary, and with no “worlds to conquer” they will have nothing else to do except live fantasy lives in fantasy worlds, substituting electronic addictions for drug addictions or combining the two for maximum effect. Perhaps AI will even reach the point where their “electronic consciousness” can be downloaded into games and some humans will achieve a semblance of immortality.
Why might we expect such a scenario of the immersion of the human in illusions and fantasy worlds to unfold? Begin with the fact that, as Henry David Thoreau explained in his classic book Walden when he observed, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Thoreau, Walden. Regardless of what some delusional philosophers might think about what they consider the human ideal of full awareness and enlightenment, the far more likely outcome is that, once freed from the discipline and opportunities of work, denied a sense of meaningfulness as well as the possibility of a giving and sharing community, “desperate” humanity will seek to fill its moral, spiritual and purposive vacuums with diversions in an effort to dull its existential emptiness.
Fanaticism is another way to deal with purposelessness. We can expect to see the emergence of more and more intolerant splinter groups. As the greatly enhanced virtual reality experiences that are beginning to emerge reach a heightened level of sophistication, the experiences they offer will flood into the abyss of our human fears of irrelevance, weakness, fear of the “dark” and pointlessness. Entering the worlds of VR and AR will allow us to realize our dreams in ways that “real” reality offers for so few. See, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/29/oculus-touch-control-future-vr. “Why the future of VR is all down to touch control: The new controllers from Oculus represent a glimpse of a virtual reality people can really lose themselves in”, Samuel Gibbs, 12/29/16.