The Great Simmering in the West
People all over the world are worried about the future. While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many. However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors. Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders. Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions. Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.
Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.” With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.
As emerging robotics programs have demonstrated, no profession will be immune to the next generations of A.I.-equipped machines. Robots will pick the fields, police the streets, and perform complex medical surgeries. A.I. can already write legal briefs that pass muster and screenplays that are at least as interesting as anything Hollywood produces these days. Engineers, architects, and chemists are competing against machines that can process a thousand lifetimes of computations before their human counterparts finish morning coffee.
Men such as Gates and Harari see this future galloping toward us and view its implications as self-evident. As human producers are replaced, human “value” will dwindle
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
