There is something magnificently stupid about the fantasy of replacing humanity with artificial intelligence and robots. Certain technology billionaires appear captivated by a future in which machines do all the work, make all the decisions, produce everything and perhaps even think for us. Humanity becomes redundant, except, apparently, for the billionaires. But this raises a rather inconvenient question: if humanity is no longer necessary, what exactly do we need the billionaires for? Their indispensable contribution, presumably, is to continue owning everything while congratulating themselves on having eliminated everyone else’s contribution.
The absurdity runs deeper than technological hubris. Wealth, ownership, authority and power are not independent properties of individuals. They are relationships sustained by the societies in which those individuals participate. Remove those relationships and the billionaire becomes just another biological organism with an unusually elaborate collection of electronic receipts. The fantasy is to automate the entire arrangement while somehow preserving the privileges it produces. It takes a peculiar kind of intelligence to become extraordinarily successful at exploiting a system while remaining so profoundly confused about one’s dependency upon it. Perhaps this is what happens when specialised competence is mistaken for general intelligence: an impressive capacity to manipulate the world, accompanied by a remarkable inability to understand one’s place within it.
The ultimate achievement of artificial intelligence may be to expose the redundancy of those most enthusiastically promoting it. If machines can outperform human workers, artists, scientists, managers and decision-makers, there is no obvious reason they should stop short of chief executives, investors and owners. An autonomous civilisation hardly needs a billionaire to explain how clever he was to finance its creation. The technology may be revolutionary, but the underlying ambition is depressingly familiar: everyone else becomes unnecessary while the people at the top remain indispensable. The trouble with building a world that no longer needs people is discovering that you’re one of them.
Key Takeaways
- If artificial intelligence makes humanity redundant, billionaires are not exempt.
- Wealth, ownership and authority exist through social relationships, not independently of them.
- Specialised technological and commercial competence should not be confused with general intelligence.
- The fantasy of making humanity redundant while preserving the privileges of billionaires ignores that those privileges depend upon the society and the people they propose to replace.
