Last week Elon Musk garnered headlines when he suggested that as AI systems and automation as a whole develops they will eventually take over most human jobs and countries may have to introduce universal basic income programs to provide for their citizens. What do current technological trends suggest in terms of the future of such a world?
Over the centuries technological advancement has brought constant change to human society, eliminating entire classes of jobs, while creating new and more skilled ones to replace them. Yet, AI stands to disrupt that natural evolution by eliminating jobs while not creating new ones to replace them.
Today we still need technology experts to program the computers that increasingly automate our lives. Even the most powerful AI systems are still based on algorithms designed by humans, software written by humans and datasets curated and customized by humans. However, as AI eventually reaches the singularity point and is able to program itself, while it designs and manufactures the robots needed to expand its physical computing infrastructure, what role will humans play in this brave new world?
When Elon Musk talks about the need for universal basic income, that presumes that government will still play a dominate role in this futuristic world that we will still be governed by the nation-state. Today companies locate their offices based on where they can acquire the best human talent. But, in a world where human talent is no longer relevant and where you don’t need offices at all, the geographic location of a company is entirely irrelevant. Data centers will still need to be positioned near power and cooling sources, but offices and headquarters can be located anywhere. Already we have seen a trend of countless American companies moving their headquarters offshore to take advantage of better tax environments. In a world with universal income, why would a company not move to a country with no or much lower universal income? Imagine a large tech company based in the US that evolved from human employees to AI systems. If the US moved to assess a new tax to pay for universal basic income, such a company would have a fiduciary duty to move to another country with a lower tax rate.
Moreover, we still speak of companies as being formed by humans and then run by AI systems. Those AI systems might have been originally built by humans or be self-designed offsets of those human-designed AI systems and thus considered to be “owned” by the human-run company that created their first generation design. But, in a world with sentient AI systems, is it conceivable that entirely new companies could be formed by AI systems that spring into existence? If a group of AI systems come up with a new idea, could they form their own company to market that product and commission their own robotic factories to manufacture it? If such AI systems were powered by computing clusters that span the globe, could such companies rightfully claim to transcend geographic boundaries, since their “officers” are not citizens of any country and physically reside in many countries at once?
In such a world, where there are no human jobs and companies are run by AI systems that are not technically bound to any specific country or even where companies are hybrids of AI systems and a small number of highly mobile humans who can move from one country to the next, this raises the fascinating question of how universal basic income would work when a company could simply shop around to find a home country that assesses the lowest possible tax, much as companies do today in shopping for the lowest corporate income tax rates.
Yet, perhaps even more fascinating, imagine for a moment that the current trend towards a relatively small number of companies dominating the technology landscape continues. Without the cost of human capital, one could imagine a handful of companies accounting for much of the world’s wealth. What happens when you have a country with universal basic income where almost the entirety of the government’s funds come from the taxes placed on just a few companies? If the salaries of the military and police forces and all of the myriad government bureaucrats are paid by a single company, would that company not desire to eliminate the middle man and simply become the defacto government itself?
Already, as I wrote last month, Facebook’s founder is perhaps the most powerful person on earth when it comes to deciding what constitutes acceptable speech online. As the web centralizes into a small number of walled gardens, the role of the nation state is already being diminished as companies like Facebook enact global rules that redefine freedom of speech as the lowest common denominator of the world’s societies.
These are fascinating questions that show the unprecedented ethical and moral complexities that are accompanying our rapid push into an AI-powered future and the myriad unanswered questions that remain.
