Futurist, transhumanist, and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil just did a short interview regarding his views on the future of jobs and some other topics. You can see it here:
My thoughts:
0:12 – Kurzweil nods to the Boring Truth of our age: The clash of ideologies ended in the 20th century (except for the ongoing sideshow that is non-viable Islamism vs. everyone else), and there’s consensus among academics and leaders in the industrialized world that having a mixed economy and some social welfare programs is close to the optimal setup for a country. In the West, conservatives and liberals push and pull, but within narrow boundaries. Similarly, the new political faultlines pit “nationalists” against “globalists,” but no one in the former camp wants to completely forsake trade. There really is a lot less drama today than the news media makes you think.
1:50 – The reasons for the rise of welfare states in the early 20th century are more complex than that, but Kurzweil makes a good point that they wouldn’t have been sustainable had there not been the economic surpluses made possible by Industrialization. If you take the long view like Kurzweil does, and you assume that technology keeps improving, the concomitant economic surpluses keep growing, and social welfare programs grow in an intelligent manner, then a future where all humans are on the dole and few if any people work is indeed the logical endpoint.
3:06 – Uh-oh. Kurzweil makes predictions that will be true in “a decade.” So by 2027, 3D printers will be able to make “at low cost, all of the physical things we need,” including large Lego-like pieces of building materials that you will be able to “snap together” to make your own house. Vertical farms will also be making “very high-quality” food at “very low prices” by 2027. Yikes. I’m skeptical of the 3D printed house prediction because the construction industry and consumers have failed to even embrace modular buildings (there’s a great report on this here: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/reinventing-construction-through-a-productivity-revolution). The notion that something even more radical like 3D printed Lego houses will become common in just ten years bucks the trend way too much. Also, I don’t see how an average person in 2027 will be able to assemble his or her house from giant Legos considering: 1) the need to pour solid concrete foundations will still exist, 2) local governments are highly unlikely to relax building codes to allow unlicensed, inexperienced people to build houses, and 3) few people have the skills to even put such Lego pieces together, particularly with enough accuracy to ensure the surfaces are truly level and plumb. Maybe what Kurzweil is trying to say is that, in 2027, there will be some construction companies that will specialize in building cheap, prefabricated houses comprised partly of 3D printed components. Plausible, but only a tiny bit different from how things are today. As for vertical farms, they’ve proven to be much more expensive to run than normal “flat” farms and haven’t caught on thanks to basic economics. If Kurzweil knows of some way that they can make food at “very low prices” in just ten years, then he should quit his job at Google and pursue it full-time since it will be worth billions of dollars. And he should also ask himself whether it would be more efficient and profitable to use that secret method to improve “flat” farms. For example, if Kurzweil thinks vertical farm costs will drop thanks to cheap, 3D printed building techniques, then won’t the same techniques also make it possible to cheaply build greenhouses over standard cropfields? If farm robots will eliminate labor costs at vertical farms, won’t they do the same at flat farms? Why would the vertical farms benefit more?
4:09 – Kurzweil observes (as he has in the past) that most of the Earth’s surface is sparsely populated, meaning there is ample room for humans to spread out. While true, it’s important to remember the reasons why: Beachfront property in Florida is more aesthetically appealing and provides more opportunities for recreation than a plot of land in the middle of Nebraska. The climate in San Francisco is more conducive to human life than that of Minot, North Dakota. Humans are also social animals (particularly when young), meaning they like to live in places where there are other people. The high (and still rising) rates of suicide and substance abuse in rural America attest to the ill effects of isolation and lack of varied things to do. He doesn’t say it in this interview, but I know from his books that his response would be something like “future technologies will substitute for all that,” meaning virtual reality will be as real as The Matrix someday, so hanging out on virtual reality Miami Beach while you’re actually lying in a VR pod in your living room will feel as real as hanging out on the real Miami Beach with your actual body. Whether or not sufficiently advanced brain-computer interfaces can be made to do that is an open question, but for sure, I doubt the technology will exist by 2027, or even 2057.
5:00 – Kurzweil predicts that, by 2027, virtual reality and “virtual avatars” will be so good that many people won’t need to live in cities anymore, and he seems to suggest there will be a detectable change to the global urbanization trend. Thanks to virtual reality, people will be able to work and play from anywhere, so they’ll choose to live outside of cities to save money. I think this is a prime example of a prediction that Kurzweil can’t possibly get wrong, and that is also almost useless. As he admits around this part of the interview, many of his colleagues at Google already work remotely, and most of us know someone who works from home. It doesn’t take a futurist or economist to see that the practice is getting more popular, so it’s a simple assumption that it will be more common by, say, 2027. Technologies related to computing, videoconferencing, and virtual reality are all obviously improving, and it’s just common sense that they will make it easier for people to work remotely. And while the number of people living in cities is growing, so is the number of people living outside of them in the suburbs and exurbs. By 2027, the suburban/exurban population could be growing faster than the truly urban population, which Kurzweil could cite as proof his prediction was right. So on close analysis, Kurzweil’s prediction is nothing more than a simple synthesis of three long-running trends in America that most adults are already aware of through direct experience. It will be almost impossible for him to be wrong, but the prediction about the future is so general and so incrementally different from today that it has no real value.
6:35 – He says we will use 3D printers to make clothes, without giving a date for when the prediction will come to pass (by 2027?). Regardless of when or if it happens, this has always struck me as a useless application of 3D printers. Today, I can buy a pack of six new cotton undershirts from Wal-Mart for $15, and they will last for years before falling apart. I can go to a local thrift store and buy durable, surprisingly good-looking used clothes that are 75% discounted from their original prices, and which will also last me many years. I can go on Craigslist right now and find people in my area who are giving away clothes for free. There is no evidence at all that our existing textile technology is deficient making clothes, or that our “standards of living” will meaningfully improve if we started making clothes with futuristic 3D printers. Even if we assume 3D printers are so superior at making clothes that they’re (almost) “free,” how much better is that than the present condition? Clothes are already free or trivially cheap. Lowering the price farther might free up enough money for you to buy a slightly bigger morning coffee at Starbucks, but that’s it. The only real beneficiaries would be fashion-obsessed people who shudder at the thought of wearing the same outfit twice and want their 3D printer to spit out some zany new creation each morning. Yay for the coming empowerment of vain people.
8:10 – Kurzweil cites changes to the nature of jobs over the last 100 years (workforce transformed from hard labor on the farm and factory to doing computer stuff in office buildings) as proof that there will always be jobs for humans in the future. While humans have always managed to move up the skills ladder and create new, gainful work for themselves as machines took over the less skilled jobs, there’s no reason to think the trend will continue forever. His argument also gets muddled when he equates people in college with people who have jobs. Studying poetry or art in college isn’t the same thing as being gainfully employed. Moreover, its a common fate for such students to have problems finding employment after college, and for them to settle for jobs that are unsatisfactory because they pay little, or because they have nothing to do with what they studied (think of the waitress with the Literature B.A.). I think it’s much safer to predict that “Humans in the future will be able to find things to do with their days but they won’t necessarily get paid much money or any money at all for what they do, and automation will be good overall for humans since it will eliminate unpleasant drudge work.”