Explore The
World With Me.

The topics and ideas discussed in this blog are drawn from a book I have under submission to a publisher.  The working title is The Road to Utopia: Automation, Justice, and How to Support Everyone When AI and Robots Create a Post-Work World.  

There’s widespread concern that AI, robotics, and automation in general are on the brink of causing catastrophic levels of unemployment so rapidly that governments will be unable to respond effectively, leading to a dystopian scenario of widespread destitution, economic dislocation caused by collapsing consumer demand, and a rising tide of anger, resentment, and social chaos.
But there is also a long tradition that says automation may lead, not to dystopia, but to a utopia where automation serves us, and the gains from automation are shared with everyone, so that we all enjoy lives of leisure and prosperity.  The book and this blog are about how to make this happen.
 
Bear in mind that “utopia” is not a synonym for “paradise,” and that the road to utopia is long and rough.  This will turn out to be far more complicated and difficult than merely “taxing the robots and paying everyone a basic income,” as many observers now recommend.  That’s “a concept of a plan,” one might say, but there are several issues to address:

When automation reduces the rate of employment without correspondingly reducing the size of GDP, then it costs less in labor to produce that GDP.  Someone is benefitting from this windfall.  How large is this windfall in relation to a given rate of displacement?  Is it reduced by the overhead cost of automation?
Who has a moral property right to the windfall?  Does it belong to the owners of capital who likely possess it, or to the displaced, or to everyone collectively?
Who, precisely, has possession of the windfall, and in what amounts?  How should we collect it from them?  How do we devise a tax that collects all and only the windfall?
How should the windfall be distributed?  Equally to everyone, or based on need, or on some other basis?
In a world without work, how can we retain the kind of meaning work can give us?
 
These may seem like questions of mere policy detail, but that appearance is deceptive.  Answering them will take a lot of work and raise important questions in philosophy and political economy.  The idea that we can use the labor savings from automation to support the displaced is by no means original.  This idea is at least 175 years old, going back to Marx and Engels, and the vision of a world served by machines goes back as far as the Greeks.  If there’s anything original in my book, it lies in how I try to answer these questions.


–John