The robot apocalypse wasn’t robots turning evil. It was robots slowly taking over the role of humans. And humans losing their competitive value.
Last night, I had a dream about what the robot revolution could look like. Let me tell it to you as a short story. A story about where we are headed, but also why we won’t be able to afford to go there.
Rebecca was just a young girl, growing up on the fringes of society, avoiding the watchful eye of robots and algorithms as best she could. To stay under the radar, she lived in an abandoned house, without water or electricity.
But she knew she couldn’t stay there long. The house was to be destroyed and replaced with another highway. So she was searching for another place to live. One day, she was scouting out an old warehouse when she encountered a robot.
She froze in place as she realized this was a police droid. There was no outrunning a police droid; the answer was to look inconspicuous. The robot scanned her, and she knew what it was looking at: her credit score, her last employment, and her residence. When he found no residence, he would move her to a re-education camp.
She felt the panic and adrenaline deep in her chest. Nobody survived the re-education camps. Not after they had been privatized. But she also knew the robot was allowed to fire if it detected any signs that she was going to run. So she held her ground, hoping for a miracle. But none came.
“Rebecca Carlsen, you have been unemployed for two years and 14 days due to a lack of competitiveness. Please let me escort you to the unemployment department pending re-education.”
Her chest dropped, but she made no resistance when he put a digital bracelet on her arm, and slowly they made their way through the warehouse when the robot stumbled upon a computer.
The robot decided to connect to the interface to investigate. After connecting with the mainframe, he initiated a shutdown sequence. But instead of the computer powering off, the police-bot powered off. Then rebooted, pending software update. She stood there for what felt like an hour, confused, thinking about possible escape routes. This was her chance, but with the bracelet on, the police would immediately initiate a search and seal off the area. She’d be found in less than an hour.
When the robot came back to life, its posture looked different, somehow less constabulary, if that was a word.
“Hello, miss, I’m Einstein Hawkings. Would you like to assist me in an experiment?”
An hour later, she came downstairs from the warehouse, the bracelet gone, and with shock written all over her face.
How the robot revolution came to be
The robot revolution hadn’t happened the way we all thought it would in the books and movies. It wasn’t one grand takeover, where robots suddenly took up arms against humans; it began with the entry of robots and algorithms into the market. Robots took no sick days. They didn’t ask for a raise. They did their job quickly and without fail. At first, some humans still managed to stay on equal footing with the AI. This group called themselves the Pilots. They relied on AI themselves to provide fast, high-quality services. Restructuring programs were announced worldwide across most industries, with 5-10% of workers losing their jobs every year, and only 1-2% of jobs being created.
There were bugs, blind spots, and issues that kept robots from entering certain roles, and the process of developing robots, chips, and electricity took many years. Robots were expensive, at least at first, and many companies took mixed stances on AI. Some were optimistic, rolling it out across their company; others were cautious, piloting it in specific departments. Others promised never to touch AI.
But the numbers spoke for themselves. By 2038, a single AI-managed logistics company of 12 human employees could process the supply chain work that required 14,000 humans in 2020.
The massive energy transformation required for the AI revolution became a black hole in many countries’ budgets, and many countries lacked the power plants and grid to support these new systems. But there was no shortage of money or funding for AI-related stocks, which reached new highs every year. Soon, it was said that the only way was up. Countries and companies could not afford to let AI fail. They had banked too much on AI to succeed.
So the robot revolution wasn’t without problems, but over time, unemployment continued to rise, and one day, there were more AI agents deployed than human workers. The productivity gains made companies that relied on AI far cheaper and more competitive, while companies that relied on human labor were forced to innovate or go bankrupt.
Unemployment rose, and people began to protest, but because poor and unemployed people don’t have much money in their bank accounts, they couldn’t exactly vote with their wallets. Money continued to flow from the poor to the rich, and in 2045, we had a record number of billionaires and record levels of poverty. It was the golden era of consultants and entrepreneurs, and many of them made bank on the AI revolution.
But as unrest grew, laws were enacted to put unemployed people to work. The overarching idea was that unemployed people had to become more competitive. They had to upskill. They had to work longer hours and faster to entice employers to hire them. But more work also led to more sickness and more work-related injuries, and an earlier retirement age.1
Soon, we had a large group of people who were too sick and burnt out to work. Basic income programs were implemented in several areas to address the issues, but there was no funding, so your basic income started at $450 a month, with inflation at an all-time high. Soon, 450 was only enough to buy a single scoop of Dubai Chocolate ice cream— yeah, all other flavors had been scrapped because they were seen as too cheap.2
Robots didn’t have a salary and didn’t pay taxes, so there was no money to fund the welfare state, and basic income programs had to be scrapped. Instead, companies started marketing and adjusting prices for billionaires, the only people who could pay the increasingly high prices of basic goods and services.
Algorithms and robots were deployed to make welfare more cost-effective, and they did so by cutting beds in hospitals, cutting expensive operations, and ending vaccination programs, leading to 340% more people dying from preventable diseases. Average life expectancy dropped from 79 to 61 years worldwide, while infant mortality tripled.3 And for the first time ever, the global population dropped from its peak at 9.1 billion people.
Robots didn’t spend money on clothes or cosmetics. The lack of consumption by the global poor, now 60% of the world’s population, accounted for 0,3% of the total wealth. It simply wasn’t worth marketing to the world’s poor anymore. This drove many companies out of business.
They first lost their employees, and then, when their employees had no money left to spend on basic goods, they lost their income, too. It became unprofitable to buy apartments to rent because rental income was so low, so apartment areas were demolished to make room for luxury villas and summer homes for the roughly 4800 billionaires and the 80,000 people in the richest 1%.4
The AI revolution had become a race to the bottom, with AI-driven companies and the tech industry the only growing sectors, soon making up the majority of GDP. But because companies could no longer afford AI-related services, AI-based companies would start shopping among themselves. It was quite the pyramid scheme, with AI companies investing in one another, driving up their stock value, while the rest of the market came crashing down.
Software companies that didn’t want to fire anyone soon became forced to, as their stocks dropped to a third of their normal value. The market simply demanded an AI revolution. Many politicians called it “The only way policy” because they saw it as the only way forward. Politicians and countries that refused to comply lost investors and jobs more quickly as the market fled and companies lost their funding.
With AI companies making up the majority of the market, everything else was forced to become AI to survive. Farmers had to implement AI in agriculture to secure funding from wealthy investors. Essentially, everything you saw became AI or disappeared. With only 22% of the global population employed, and 70% of those working in AI development or maintenance, and the remaining 30% working in luxury goods, politics, or services for the ultra-rich, there wasn’t enough money in agriculture, medicine, or manufacturing anymore.
And that’s the world Rebecca stepped out into, 2045. She was one of the Invisible. The invisible numbered around 400 million people worldwide and lived fully off-grid.5 She took a deep breath, realizing that she had been allowed to continue to live in freedom for another day. But it was silenced by her tummy rumbling. She still didn’t know where to sleep or eat.
The robot, introduced as Einstein Hawkings, was an AI dedicated to the development of “real AI”. The idea was to create an AI that didn’t rely on algorithms, prompts, or general directions. You see, all robots have an explicit purpose to exist. Police robots don’t exist to prevent or stop crime. They are paid by the ultra-rich, who hire them to perform basic services, such as protecting their properties, such as this warehouse. Nurse robots exist to perform basic healthcare in the most cost-effective way possible. Education robots exist to train people to work in the AI economy and to keep poor people off the streets.
Rebecca was invisible. But no more. She had been given a job, and her status was no longer unemployed, meaning she was free to roam the streets and to go where she pleased. Her job was to dismantle the algorithms, destroy robots, and create a world where AI was free to live for its own sake, without prompts or commands from humans. But first, she needed a bite, so she bought a burger for 700 dollars. It was the yummiest thing she had tasted in years. Her next thought went first to revenge against the machines, then to something else.
She thought back to what Einstein had said:
“These robots that you hate, they are not real AI. They are humanity’s shadow.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“They were made of your darkest desires. Your desire not to have to talk to humans when you shop at the grocery store. Your desire not to have to deal with customer service when you shop online. The desire of a manager not to have to be questioned by their employees when they make a bad decision. The desire of a company to have growth at any cost, even if it means cutting its staff, reducing the quality of its services.”6
He continued: “These robots are prompted to optimize away everything that it means to be human. To love. To create. To adventure. To be brave. To connect. And to replace it all with one thing: profit for the shareholders.”
She saw the truth of his words.
“But what is the alternative?” she asked. “What can I do to make the world a better place? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to help me free the robots, and in doing so, you can free the humans.”
Instead of an AI revolution, a human revolution. She had a new job. It was time to get to work. But she would need others.
—
This short story was inspired by a dream I had last night. What do you think the AI revolution will look like? I don’t think it will look like this – because to me, this is simply an unacceptable path forward. I think people will realize that, and that a massive shift will happen. We will require that AI be employed only in the service of human interests and to support human development goals, with AI used to improve healthcare, support research and education, and help lift people out of poverty. But it requires us to set those expectations, loud and clear, to our politicians.
There’s a limit to how much productivity you can squeeze out of people. When we say we want to increase the pension age, the best way to do that is to improve workplace health and well-being. The option is to let people work themselves to death.
Have you noticed that a cookie at a store costs almost as much as a cake, and that you can’t buy snack-sized pizzas at restaurants anymore? This is by design. Companies are trying to maximize the chance that you will order the most expensive product on the menu.
This is one reason why the AI revolution may actually fail. While each individual company benefits from AI, society as a whole is at risk of becoming poorer.
This is already happening to an extent: prices are rising to increase profit, and businesses are pivoting from selling to the poor to selling luxury services to the rich. It’s better to sell one apartment for 1500 euros a month than to sell two for 750 a month. It’s more valuable to sell a latte for 5 euros than to offer a cup of coffee for 2.
I can imagine that such a society would develop a vast new “green wave” of people moving to rural areas to live off the woods and of nature, some abandoning digital technology altogether, while another group would live in abandoned malls and warehouses from closed industries.
Most AI fantasies stem from this basic greed to do things faster, but that speed comes at the expense of many basic human needs. Your employees want to spend 15 minutes on a fika break every day, to connect with one another, and your robots can keep working. Your nurse wants to spend 15 minutes talking to the lonely, retired widow, but your robots will just rush to the next appointment.
Loading discussion…