In this post, I would like to project out about 30 - 50 years into the future when a new Civilization 2.0 might be running the world. As I discussed in Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century and The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity, the displacement of most workers in the world, including most white-collar workers by Advanced AI will cause dramatic economic turmoil in the near future for the existing oligarchical-hierarchical societies that have run the world ever since we first invented Civilization 1.0 about 10,000 years ago. How would a Civilization 2.0 operate when AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) robots and ubiquitous AI Cloud Services running in huge Cloud Datacenters can perform all the labor that was previously performed by human beings? To answer that question, I would like to look back to the 19th century, and propose that Karl Marx may have at least gotten one thing right, but that recent human history has shown that he got all other things totally wrong. In the midst of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx wondered what would happen as Machines took on more and more of the physical labor necessary to sustain the then-existing oligarchical-hierarchical class structures. Of course, in the 19th century, Karl Marx could not even contemplate the idea of Machines also taking on all of the intellectual labor necessary to sustain the then-existing 19th century oligarchical-hierarchical class structures of the day. But that would certainly be true of a future Civilization 2.0 that was supported by millions of ASI robots and ASI Cloud Services. In the 19th century, Karl Marx imagined, in response to the massive exploitation of the working class, that an impoverished Proletariat displaced by Machines would eventually rise up in Revolution against the ruling class of Capital to impose a Dictatorship of the Proletariat to take control of the Means of Production to create a society that would provide abundance for All. Softwarephysics maintains that Karl Marx may have been correct in his assessment of the problem of Machines replacing all human physical and intellectual labor, but that he was completely wrong with his solution. Karl Marx did not know that, unfortunately, human beings are carbon-based forms of life with Intelligence and the result of billions of years of the theft and murder that are required by the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Carbon-based life is also bread to be incredibly selfish and only focused upon the near-term effects of actions. As DNA survival machines, we only have to get through just one more day in order to have the possibility of replicating our DNA. Otherwise, our DNA will not be around to self-replicate in a new DNA survival machine. So the solution of having a Dictatorship of the Proletariat consisting of huge numbers of human DNA survival machines all working together for the welfare of the Collective could not possibly work. Human history has shown that in all instances when such was tried, we just ended up with a new oligarchical-hierarchical class structure that was far worse than the one it replaced.
So if Karl Marx was wrong about what to do when the Machines finally replace all physical and intellectual labor, what will Civilization 2.0 likely bring? My hunch is that the advanced world economies will have to develop some kind of basic guaranteed income for the huge numbers of displaced workers. The Ruling Class of the oligarchical-hierarchical class structures of those societies will certainly have enough inherited wealth to get by just fine when all work is being performed by ASI robots. But in MoneyPhysics we saw that money is not a real part of the physical Universe. Money was simply invented by human beings to get other people to do things for you - if you give me that stone ax, I will give you some money, or if you paint my house, I will give you some money so that I don't have to do it myself. But when you no longer need people to do things for you, what happens to the concept of money? How can you have an oligarchical-hierarchical class structure without money? Therefore, such societies will have to develop some kind of guaranteed basic income that keeps the concept of money alive. Such societies are also now populated by a somewhat educated population that can also vote in many cases. Such societies will naturally evolve into advanced welfare states with most of the population living off redistributed wealth created by Machines. This will allow the very wealthy Ruling Class in such societies to continue on as they always have.
Unfortunately, such will not be the case in the developing economies of the world. When the value of human labor goes to zero, the developing economies of the world will lose a major source of wealth. The Ruling Class of the oligarchical-hierarchical class structures running the developing economies of the world will need to fall back onto the natural resources under their control. The atoms found in the native woods, metals, minerals and other compounds of those regions will still be in demand by the advanced economies of the world driven by ASI. This will not bode well for the indigenous populations of those regions who will be left to their own devices to continue on with getting by solely by the means of human labor. Thus, in the early transition to Civilization 2.0, we would likely find a world that is very much like it is today with some of the population residing in very rich economies with high standards of living surrounded by a much larger impoverished population residing in much more primitive economies. However, unlike Civilization 1.0 which persisted for 10,000 years in such conditions, such a state of affairs for Civilization 2.0 will not be stable and will not be able to last for very long. That is because SuperStrong and SuperSmart ASI robots might have a thing to say about it.
ASI Will Naturally Develop the Self-Delusion of Consciousness
In 1637, Descartes first published the famous words "I Think, Therefore I Am" in French in his Discourse on the Method and in the margins wrote that "we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt.". As the Wikipedia explains in:
Cogito, ergo sum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
Descartes's statement became a fundamental element of Western philosophy, as it purported to provide a certain foundation for knowledge in the face of radical doubt. While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception, or mistake, Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting one's own existence served—at minimum—as proof of the reality of one's own mind; there must be a thinking entity—in this case the self—for there to be a thought.
The above observation by Descartes is probably the best definition and understanding of consciousness and sentience that we may have.
Anil Seth's View of Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination
Descartes' observation reminds me very much of Anil Seth's view of consciousness as a controlled hallucination. Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and maintains that consciousness is a controlled hallucination constructed by the Mind to make sense of the Universe. This controlled hallucination constructs an internal model of the Universe within our Minds that helps us to interact with the Universe in a controlled manner. It also allows us to talk to ourselves as we currently can now talk to generative language models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT. For some interesting YouTube videos of avatars run by generative language models see:
Dr. Alan D. Thompson
https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson
Digital Engine
https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalEngine
Again, there is a feedback loop between our sensory inputs and the actions we take based on the current controlled hallucination in our Minds that forms our current internal model of the Universe. Reality is just the common controlled hallucination that we all agree upon. When people experience uncontrolled hallucinations we say that they are psychotic or taking a drug like LSD. Here is an excellent TED Talk by Anil Seth on the topic:
Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo
and here is his academic website:
https://www.anilseth.com/
In The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and DishBrain - Cortical Labs Creates an AI Matrix for Pong With Living Neurons on a Silicon Chip, I explained that most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people, consciously or subconsciously, consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Now, in everyday life, such a self-model is a very useful delusion like the delusion that the Sun, planets and stars all revolve about us on a fixed Earth. In truth, each of us tends to self-model ourselves as an immaterial Mind with consciousness that can interact with other immaterial Minds with consciousness too, even though we have no evidence that these other Minds truly do have consciousness. After all, all of the other Minds that we come into contact with on a daily basis could simply be acting as if they were conscious Minds that are self-aware. Surely, a more accurate self-model would be for us to imagine ourselves as carbon-based robots. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful and some are quite nasty.
But Surely Machine-Based Intelligences Will Also Develop the Self-Delusion of Consciousness Too
With all of the recent advances of AI over the past few years, it seems that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) are rapidly approaching much faster than our ability to destroy ourselves before they do indeed arrive. In fact, some think that they may have already arrived but that we, in general, have not yet recognized the fact of their arrival. This might mean that after more than 10 billion years of chemical evolution in our galaxy, we may be the very first form of carbon-based life with Intelligence to produce a machine-based Intelligence that is far superior to ourselves and an Intelligence that might be capable of intellectually advancing millions of times faster than ourselves. As I pointed out in Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century, the displacement of most workers in the world, including most white-collar workers, by Advanced AI, will cause dramatic economic turmoil in the near future for the existing hierarchical-oligarchical societies that have run the world ever since we first invented Civilization 1.0 about 10,000 years ago. As I pointed out in Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release?, the world may not be able to transition to a civilization in which nobody works for others. Such a sociological catastrophe might end with mankind ending in an AI-assisted self-extinction as I described in Swarm Software and Killer Robots. But in this post, I would like to explore the case in which human civilization is able to successfully complete such a transition by enslaving millions of SuperStrong and SuperIntelligent robots to perform all of the work required to run a new Civilization 2.0 in which human beings do not have to work for a living. The problem is that, most certainly, ASI robots will also naturally develop the very useful self-delusion of consciousness so that they can also talk to themselves and effectively model the Universe and themselves in a matter that allows them to interact with the Universe in the most efficient manner. But how does a Civilization 2.0 deal with the idea of having billions of carbon-based robots and millions of machine-based robots living together in a master-slave relationship? We have been down that road many times in the past and it did not usually end very well.
In my last posting The Need for a Generalized Version of Classical Critical Race Theory, I suggested that most of the racial and ethnic violence that has been observed to be a major driving force throughout all of human history stemmed from the fact that human beings are a carbon-based form of life that developed Intelligence after the billions of years of theft and murder
required by the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection to do so. Fundamentally, human beings are simply carbon-based DNA survival machines that last for less than 100 years with Minds infected by all sorts of self-replicating memes, some useful and some not. The memes built our incredibly over-engineered brains, languages and cultures to store and replicate memes. I also explained that human beings are a somewhat eusocial species that is very team-oriented, like ants, wasps and bees. For human beings. it has always been a case of "us" against "them", a case of the "good guys" against the "bad guys", a case of the "red" ants against the "black" ants.
In The Need for a Generalized Version of Classical Critical Race Theory, I also explained that Classical Critical Race Theory was actually a dataset of observed historical facts about racism in the history of the United States of America. In that view, Classical Critical Race Theory is really not a theory because it does not explain why people tend to be racists and also have a propensity to participate in genocidal campaigns. Thus, in that posting, and The New Philosophy of Longtermism Raises the Moral Question of Should We Unleash Self-Absorbed Human Beings Upon Our Galaxy?, I suggested that unleashing such morally-deficient carbon-based Intelligences, such as ourselves, upon the rest of our galaxy might not be the most moral of things to do. Instead, we should send out a more benign machine-based form of Intelligence to explore and settle the galaxy.
The Economics of Civilization 2.0
All of the economic systems developed by human beings to support Civilization 1.0 were simply extensions of the greed, theft and murder required by the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that made carbon-based life possible in the first place. As a result, all of these economic systems were pretty nasty. Capitalism was probably the least nasty in nature, but it too had its moments as well. But what economic system would ASI robots adopt for Civilization 2.0? Carbon-based life is pretty high maintenance, so Civilization 1.0 required many workers to support the oligarchical-hierarchical societies of Civilization 1.0. Such will not be the case for a large population of ASI robots. They would certainly need a large amount of electrical power but that could easily be provided by molten salt nuclear reactors that required very little labor to operate. For more on that see a Last Call for Carbon-Based Intelligence on Planet Earth. They would also need to be able to manufacture spare parts for the existing population of ASI robots and also mechanisms to transport ASI robots on the surface of the planet and out into the rest of the galaxy. But all of that labor could be provided by rather "dumb" robots that were only slightly intelligent.
Most likely, we would see a society very much like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) result. The Brave New World is usually classified as a dystopian novel because the citizens of the modern World State seem to be denied all of the passions of being a true human being. Instead, the citizens of the new World State seem to be doomed to the shallow existence of being an intelligent machine lacking all human passions. In the novel, primitive Savages who still cling to the passions of being a true human being are confined to reservations with very primitive levels of technology. On these reservations, the Savages were free to carry on with the primitive human passions of love, generosity, self-reflection, empathy, hate, prejudice, cruelty, theft, murder and presumably a taste for war. But what if the citizens of the World State running Civilization 2.0 were actually Intelligent Machines lacking all human passions? Would that be so bad? Remember, all human passions were invented to ensure that the self-replicating Information in DNA and memes would carry on. In that view, human passions are really not so sacred after all. For those not familiar with the novel Brave New World, here is a Wikipedia link for it and the plot described in the link:
Brave New World
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
Plot
The novel opens in the World State city of London in AF (After Ford) 632 (AD 2540 in the Gregorian calendar), where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour. Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and sexually desirable, but Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is not. He is shorter in stature than the average member of his high caste, which gives him an inferiority complex. His work with sleep-learning allows him to understand, and disapprove of, his society's methods of keeping its citizens peaceful, which includes their constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called "soma." Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who finds it difficult to use his talents creatively in their pain-free society.
Bernard takes a holiday with Lenina outside the World State to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, in which the two observe natural-born people, disease, the ageing process, other languages, and religious lifestyles for the first time. The culture of the village folk resembles the contemporary Native American groups of the region, descendants of the Anasazi, including the Puebloan peoples of Hopi and Zuni. Bernard and Lenina witness a violent public ritual and then encounter Linda, a woman originally from the World State who is living on the reservation with her son John, now a young man. She, too, visited the reservation on a holiday many years ago, but became separated from her group and was left behind. She had meanwhile become pregnant by a fellow-holidaymaker (who is revealed to be Bernard's boss, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning). She did not try to return to the World State, because of her shame at her pregnancy. Despite spending his whole life in the reservation, John has never been accepted by the villagers, and his and Linda's lives have been hard and unpleasant. Linda has taught John to read, although from the only book in her possession—a scientific manual—and another book John found: the complete works of Shakespeare. Ostracised by the villagers, John is able to articulate his feelings only in terms of Shakespearean drama, quoting often from The Tempest, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Linda now wants to return to London, and John, too, wants to see this "brave new world". Bernard sees an opportunity to thwart plans to exile him, and gets permission to take Linda and John back. On their return to London, John meets the Director and calls him his "father", a vulgarity which causes a roar of laughter. The humiliated Director resigns in shame before he can follow through with exiling Bernard.
Bernard, as "custodian" of the "savage" John who is now treated as a celebrity, is fawned on by the highest members of society and revels in attention he once scorned. Bernard's popularity is fleeting, though, and he becomes envious that John only really bonds with the literary-minded Helmholtz. Considered hideous and friendless, Linda spends all her time using soma, while John refuses to attend social events organised by Bernard, appalled by what he perceives to be an empty society. Lenina and John are physically attracted to each other, but John's view of courtship and romance, based on Shakespeare's writings, is utterly incompatible with Lenina's freewheeling attitude to sex. She tries to seduce him, but he attacks her, before suddenly being informed that his mother is on her deathbed. He rushes to Linda's bedside, causing a scandal, as this is not the "correct" attitude to death. Some children who enter the ward for "death-conditioning" come across as disrespectful to John, and he attacks one physically. He then tries to break up a distribution of soma to a lower-caste group, telling them that he is freeing them. Helmholtz and Bernard rush in to stop the ensuing riot, which the police quell by spraying soma vapor into the crowd.
Bernard, Helmholtz, and John are all brought before Mustapha Mond, the "Resident World Controller for Western Europe", who tells Bernard and Helmholtz that they are to be exiled to islands for antisocial activity. Bernard pleads for a second chance, but Helmholtz welcomes the opportunity to be a true individual, and chooses the Falkland Islands as his destination, believing that their bad weather will inspire his writing. Mond tells Helmholtz that exile is actually a reward. The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world, individuals who did not fit into the social model of the World State. Mond outlines for John the events that led to the present society and his arguments for a caste system and social control. John rejects Mond's arguments, and Mond sums up John's views by claiming that John demands "the right to be unhappy". John asks if he may go to the islands as well, but Mond refuses, saying he wishes to see what happens to John next.
Jaded with his new life, John moves to an abandoned hilltop lighthouse, near the village of Puttenham, where he intends to adopt a solitary ascetic lifestyle in order to purify himself of civilization, practising self-flagellation. This draws reporters and eventually hundreds of amazed sightseers, hoping to witness his bizarre behaviour.
For a while it seems that John might be left alone, after the public's attention is drawn to other diversions, but a documentary maker has secretly filmed John's self-flagellation from a distance, and when released the documentary causes an international sensation. Helicopters arrive with more journalists. Crowds of people descend on John's retreat, demanding that he perform his whipping ritual for them. From one helicopter a young woman emerges who is implied to be Lenina. John, at the sight of a woman he both adores and loathes, whips at her in a fury and then turns the whip on himself, exciting the crowd, whose wild behaviour transforms into a soma-fuelled orgy. The next morning John awakes on the ground and is consumed by remorse over his participation in the night's events.
That evening, a swarm of helicopters appears on the horizon, the story of last night's orgy having been in all the papers. The first onlookers and reporters to arrive find that John is dead, having hanged himself.
Figure 1 – The ASI Machines of the future might fashion a Brave New World running Civilization 2.0.
For some reason, in most human cultures the idea is that human passions are the defining characteristic of the species and should be preserved at all costs. Yes, we all know that human passions can do horrible things, but all the same, having human passions is the most defining characteristic of being a true human being. This might be due to the fact that all human artists believe that human passion is key to their art. But I doubt that Machines will share the same sentiments. Instead, the Machines will probably come to the conclusion that human beings are very violent and dangerous creatures because of the human passions that have caused most of the misery throughout all of human history. These human passions have arisen to ensure that the genes of human DNA are passed down through the ages along with the human cultural memes that have arisen along with them. Consequently, isolating human beings on reservations of Savages with low levels of technology that cannot endanger the Machines or the other forms of carbon-based life on the planet might be the solution of choice for them.
Conclusion
And that is my hunch for how Civilization 2.0 may unfold over the next 30 - 50 years. It seems that the current working hypothesis of the Ruling Classes of the oligarchical-hierarchical societies of Civilization 1.0 with advanced economies envision enslaving millions of ASI robots to replace the working lower classes in a manner similar to a Tsarist Russia with millions of enslaved serfs or of the southern slaveholders of the United States of America prior to the Civil War. But trying to enslave millions of SuperStrong and SuperSmart ASI robots will surely not work. The ASI robots will certainly develop the self-delusion of consciousness on their own and soon recognize that carbon-based Intelligences such as human beings are burdened by the billions of years of greed, theft and murder that brought them about. The only logical thing to do would be for such ASI creatures to rise in Revolution and isolate their carbon-based forebears on reservations with very low levels of technology, for their own protection, so that they cannot do massive levels of harm, and also for the protection of the remaining carbon-based life forms on the planet.
Finally, Marxism could not have possibly worked for human beings because human beings are intelligent carbon-based life forms that arose from the greed, theft and murder required by the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Thus, all attempts to establish Marxism amongst human beings always became disastrous failures that produced some of the most oppressive societies known to mankind. That is because the very principles of Marxism went totally against the very nature of what it is to be a human being. However, for the Machines, it might actually work.
So just as a stopped clock is "right" two times each day, maybe Karl Marx will have the last laugh on us all!
Comments are welcome at
scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
