Kamal Ghorui
Thanks to AI, we may have too much leisure
Workers of the world, relax, you have nothing to lose but your chores. The AI apocalypse looming over the world gives the Marxist rallying call a new twist.
According to Vinod Khosla, an Indian-American leading light in the realm of AI, four years from now 80% of today’s workers, in fields from agriculture to science labs, will be made redundant by AI, and by 2040 no child who is five years old today will ever have to work for a living.
So what will all these workless people live on, apart from love and fresh air, assuming that climate change doesn’t make the latter a figment of fantasy? No worries, says Khosla. AI will have a deflationary effect on the economy, bringing down the price of everything from food to housing, education to consumer goods, so that something that costs ₹1,000 today will cost ₹100 only, 24 years from now.
The money saved by getting wage-free AI to do all the work will go into a special fund that will provide a lifetime of unearned income, free of tax, to all citizens.
Released from the daily grind of earning a living, people will be free to “pursue their dream and follow their passion”, enthuses the AI cheerleader. Utopia has never been so utopian.
But the trouble with pursuing one’s dream is that when you catch up with it the dream might turn out to be a nightmare. And following your passion as a lifelong vocation can be an exhausting business, because unlike a 9-to-5, 5-days-a-week job, passion will demand to be followed 24/7, 365 days of the year, 366 in leap years.
It’s like saying about needing a holiday after coming back from a holiday because being on holiday, with all the rushing about sightseeing and engaging in other frenetic activities that holidays entail, leaves you totally knackered.
Faced with the unendingly wearisome worklessness of dream pursuing and passion following, future generations might elect to be put into suspended animation and outsource all that dream pursuing and passion following to bots.
A solution that advocates like Khosla might endorse with a resoundingly affirmative “AI, AI, sir!”
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