The future's not ours to see

Whispers Beyond The Stars is set twenty-five years from now in one possible future. I wouldn't bet on that being the actual future, history being such a squirmy and chaotic thing, but I’m always interested to hear forecasts of what life is going to be like. Elon Musk claims to think that money won’t matter by 2036. I don’t think he really believes that, but he might think he believes it. Quite possibly he was thrilled as a teenager by Star Trek’s depiction of a post-scarcity society. Adult Elon probably doesn’t realize that the Federation is a socialist utopia, socialism being a term that makes him lose his shit, but the dreams of teen Elon are still sparking away dimly in the depths of that ketamine-treated brain.

Ten years might be a stretch, especially to attain super-intelligent AGI, so let’s stick with Whispers' longer horizon of 2050. With advanced robotics and very good AI, labour might be effectively free. Even energy might be free if (a big if, this) we have controlled fusion. What won’t be free? Living space for one. That apartment overlooking Central Park will still be beyond the means of most. Minerals that only need labour to extract would be more or less free, but unfortunately the rare earths needed for electronics aren’t among them, so your household robot won’t be free unless it has a very different kind of electronic brain from those we can build now.

So this is post-scarcity with a jagged edge. And by the way we in the developed world already have a post-scarcity society from the perspective of the poorer nations. Elon Musk talks about “universal high income” -- no mere UBI for him, you see. Hang on, though. A billion people live on less than $3 a day while the Western World has a median income more than twenty times that. We’re not distributing the world’s wealth fairly now, so why would that change by 2050?

If robotics really takes off, there might be a vast workforce that’s effectively slave labour. There might also be a vast slave army. Those robots will be owned by the likes of Musk and/or by the governments of the major powers. Will they dole out UBI? That depends on who controls the weapons. You’re an absurdly rich person with a private military and you only have to reach out your hand for anything you need. How much money will you throw to the masses to spare yourself the inconvenience of waging continual war on them?

In Whispers Beyond The Stars we used a different template for our future world. Not Roddenberry’s Federation but Ancient Rome. There you have wealth concentrated into the hands of a few, labour (but not warfare) largely carried out by slaves, and UBI in the form of the dole. Bread and circuses keep the people acquiescent while the oligarchs enjoy all the luxury.

What about Elon Musk’s prediction that artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence by 2031? “There really won't be anything that AI can’t do better than humans apart from being human.” And he thinks (or claims to think, or believes he thinks) that means AI will be in charge: “In the same way that if the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge.”

Is that so? Intelligent people don’t run this planet. Really they don’t; just take a look at it. The US has a government that opposes vaccination and mRNA research. Russia is drilling for self-replacing oil on the basis of a theory barely less barmy than some of the Nazis’ pseudoscience ideas. Politicians get elected without even trying to make any intelligent arguments, knowing that flattery, lies and hatemongering will stand them in far better stead at the ballot box than reason ever could -- or else they seize power by force and install dictators who are never chosen on the strength of their intellect. Meanwhile the vast majority of smart people have no chance of doing anything with their intelligence because they belong to the two-fifths of humanity that has to make do with 1% of global wealth.

I sound like I’m disdainful of Elon Musk’s theories, and I certainly wouldn’t call him a genius, as Zanny Minton Beddoes has, because I don’t use the term genius so promiscuously. (Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, maybe a few others; that's it.) Most of my friends are at least as smart as Elon seems to be, and with the added bonus that most of them know what they don't know. But I agree with him when he says, “The most important thing for AI safety is [for it] to be maximally truth-seeking and curious. If that's the case I think it will foster humanity.”

That is, it will be morally better than us; a low bar, as I’ve argued before.

One remark Elon Musk made I found especially revealing: “I've said many times I think work is going to be optional. Maybe a good comparison would be gardening. You don't have to grow vegetables in in your garden. You can go to the store and they're going to be pristine vegetables, or you could grow vegetables in your garden and they will actually be less perfect. Your tomatoes are not going to be as plump and juicy as the ones at the store. They’ll look a little artisanal. But if you go to a friend's house and they make dinner with vegetables from their garden, it's a nice touch.”

I know people who grow their own fruit and vegetables in the garden. They are much, much tastier than anything I can buy in any of the stores that I can afford. So presumably Elon Musk’s cook has access to stores where they can source vegetables even better than that. There’s no better illustration of how detached from everyday reality you can get if you have three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

The comfort zone

This excerpt from the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide has been getting shared on social media recently, turning into a gaming shibboleth after Elon Musk commented on it. (I'm surprised he had the time between tweeting puerile 'jokes', supporting fascists, and spreading misinformation about UK & European politics, but a brain soaked in ketamine has unusual priorities, I guess.)

It's a matter of etiquette rather than rules, and the DM's Guide approach isn't how I'd personally handle sensitivity among players. Consider two different games that you might join. One umpire (or DM if you must) offers the comfort tools outlined above. If you object to anything in the game you can stop the action and ask for something to be changed or deleted, much like a censor watching the pre-release cut of a movie. The other umpire starts off by saying that if you have any red lines you're better off not joining the game. So that's the equivalent of going to a movie theatre and checking the age ratings so you don't take your kids into an NC-17.

Those might be examples of Isaiah Berlin's two forms of liberty, though I'll leave it to the philosophers out there to tell us which is which. As I said in an old post, there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they're going to disapprove of, and both approaches deal with that. I prefer the certificate method to the x-card one, given that I very often aim to include extremely disquieting horror elements in my scenarios, and once called off a campaign rather than exclude one of my players who objected to the tone I was planning for the game. And I agree with Hubert Selby Jr that self-censorship is creatively stifling, and that would include group self-censorship. But if the creative outcome, the art, is not your main reason for roleplaying then you're perfectly entitled to join the self-censoring group. It all depends on what you're after.

Here's another way (from Upon a Distant Shore, a D&D campaign book) to handle players objecting to stuff in the game. It seems fair enough to me, but social media immediately lit up with people objecting that it wasn't using comfort "tools" the way they insist on framing them:

Folks get irate because not everyone uses their preferred gaming-table etiquette. But why? As long as you're told the etiquette upfront and so can ensure you aren't going to get unexpectedly upset or offended, isn't that all that matters? You go and watch Paddington in Peru, I'll watch Titus Andronicus, and we're both happy. So I'm not quite sure why the issue divides people into warring camps, other than the fact that pretty much anything does that these days; we're right back in the era of the Blues and the Greens. And Elon Musk is using that fact to buy control of the Western world, so we'd better all smarten the fuck up before it's too late.

This again?

'You should read some history, sonny boy. Read about the Black Shirts and the Gestapo and concentration camps.'

'That's not the same thing as Lisa Treadgold. Hitler was a fiend. Lisa's just a very beautiful woman with strong opinions. Do you mind her being so beautiful?' Timothy asked innocently.

These words made Fanny so angry she stopped the car. 'Listen, dumbo,' she said, glaring. 'I realize I'm no oil painting, and I'm not rich, and I'm not famous, and no one wants my autograph--'

'And you smoke too much,' Timothy said cheekily, trying to make her smile. Really, he was quite afraid of her at that moment. She looked fierce.

'And I smoke too much,' Fanny agreed. 'But there's one thing I'll tell you, and it's this. Learn to be frightened. When you see some magic-type person, a public person, hogging the media to talk about bringing back the birch and hanging, it's time to get a little nervous. Because the person who gets beaten or hanged might turn out to be someone you know. You with me so far?'

Timothy said, 'Okay so far.'

'But when that sort of person talks about action groups and banded together brotherhoods of citizens and vigilantes, get terrified. Because the person who gets dragged away in the middle of the night for a flogging might turn out to be you. Yes, you. Simply because you're a decent, normal, pleasant, dim human being. The sort of person who just happens to get in the way of the bully boys and bully girls. Do you understand, Timothy?'

Nicholas Fisk's novel You Remember Me! was originally published in 1986 but has been forgotten where other kids/YA fantasies, less uncompromising, have endured. Too bad. In it, a TV star founds a right-wing populist political movement with promises to make the country great again. A generation raised on stories like that might not be making the mistake of putting people like this in power -- because, once they have it, they intend to hold onto it, and to do so they will uncaringly wreck the democratic institutions and regulations that have taken generations to set up.

Narcissists and plutocrats served by a coterie of sycophants and compliant dopes insincerely pandering to the electorate's sense of inadequacy with crude slogans... it's a stuck record and you'd think people would be fed up to the back teeth of it, but it seems that politics, like entertainment, just consists of the same old clichés endlessly recycled.

I'm not delusional; I realize there's no going back to 'normality' now. Western democracy is in its end-of-the-republic phase, authoritarian regimes are thriving, and the world is cooking its own goose. Still, track down a copy of Mr Fisk's book if you can find one. Or at least listen to the hosts of the Backlisted podcast discuss it with author Sam Leith. Or watch Asif Kapadia's new movie 2073. Too grim? Hey, it's less disheartening than watching the news. 

More about Elon Musk tomorrow, I'm sorry to say.