Every so often one needs to abandon the hackneyed discourses that surround everyday politics and contemplate lasting solutions to tectonic issues. I had this in mind last week when I concluded that the demand for a universal basic income (UBI) is not necessarily motivated by opportunistic vote buying, poverty alleviation or technological job displacement but can be rooted in deeper humanistic concerns. I promised to address this issue today, and must say that I believe that at no point in human history has a more holistic consideration of the human condition been as necessary as now, when mankind faces two existential threats, namely from climate change and technology – the development of artificial intelligence (AI) – both of which I believe result from our natural propensity to seek after the best possible livelihood with the least amount of work. So huge are these threats that it might appear farfetched to tie even a part of the solution to the establishment of UBI – removing the link between consumption and work.
Only diehard climate deniers still need convincing that climate change is an existential threat to human existence that requires extreme moral restraint upon the current pattern and level of our consumption to conserve the natural resources we use and all of our ingenuity to devise climate- friendly technologies to cope with the existing threat and present and future growth and development. Unfortunately, the technological capacity that we are busily expanding to deal with our environmental concerns has already given rise to AI that has become a threat in itself; so much so, that Elon Musk, the technology entrepreneur, designer and co-founder and CEO Tesla Motors, has claimed that AI is ‘our biggest existential threat’ (https://www.bbc.com/news /technology-30290540).
This is not simply the bleating of some hypersensitive exploitative entrepreneur, the world- renowned late Professor Stephen Hawking told the BBC that, ‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ The primitive forms of AI, he said, have proven very useful, but he feared the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans. ‘It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate … Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” Even what the BBC called the less pessimistic Rollo Carpenter, creator of Cleverbot, the software that learns from its past conversations and has deceived a high proportion of people into believing they were speaking to a human, believes that although humans will remain in charge of AI technology for the next few decades (as a comparison, PNC has been in government for 3 decades, the PPP/C 2 and we may have a good 2 decades in the oil business) ‘We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can’t know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it’.
Can humans avoid this double whammy? Are they related and if so can they be advantageously compartmentalized and defeated? What approaches should we establish to counteract the presumed present trajectory, etc.? In an argument with Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher and inventor of the theory of utility (social policy should seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number of the population), Karl Marx said that ‘To know what is useful to a dog, one must study dog nature. … Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human activities, movement, relations, etc. … must first deal with human nature in general and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch’ (Das Capital Vol. 1. 1909). Long before Marx, philosophers had investigated the nature of man and created huge behavioural systems based upon their conclusions, and today, consciously or unconsciously most social policies are rooted in some assumptions about human nature, and I believe that some such contemporary understanding of this is necessary as we proceed.
A New Scientist article claimed that while it would be generally agreed that man is a ‘smart, talkative, upright ape with a penchant for material possessions’, not all theorists will agree. Some believe that humans could become anything they want to be. Marx left some room for this by accepting that human nature is modified in the historical process. The article went on to identify six other characteristics of contemporary man with which I believe there can be broad agreement.
Humans are playful: no other species pursues such a wide variety of entertainment or spends so much time enjoying itself. Humans are scientific: they are constantly sorting the world into categories, predicting how things work, and testing those predictions. Humans are legislative: with our language skills and greater brainpower, man has developed elaborate systems of rules, taboos and etiquette. Humans are Epicurean: compared to other animals, humans do not just eat but make an elaborate meal. Humans are sexually clandestine: they have sex in private. Humans are gossipy: language has shaped our nature and perhaps our way with words reaches its apogee in gossip (https://www.newscientist. com/round-up/human-nature/).
In summary, I believe that it would be fair to say that generally humans are largely motivated by the desire and are endowed with the capacity to live as securely and comfortably as can be imagined with the least expenditure of work. In this endeavour, they objectify themselves and exploit their environment, including themselves, and in so doing perennially develop their creative capacities. ‘The universality of man’ Marx said in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ‘appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all of nature his organic body – both in as much as nature is (a) his direct means to life and (b) the material, object and instrument of his life activities.’ Unlike other animals humans do not only produce under pressure of immediate physical needs: ‘man produces even when he is free from physical needs and only truly produces in freedom therefrom’(Ibid). Beyond this animalist production process that is rooted in real or induced needs ‘begins the development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon the realm of necessity (work) as its basis.
The shortening of the working day is its fundamental prerequisite’ (Das Capital. 1909).
The struggle to shorten the working day has been universal and in comparison to the 40 to 44 hours a week that exists in most places today in Germany and France it averages about 26.3 and 28.5 hours per week respectively. Like the shortening of the working day, UBIs can be considered in that class of social instruments that seek to remove the link between work and the right to consume: they expand human freedom in the present production era. The more profound implication here is that these types of interventions serve to undercut the contemporary social importance of consumption as an important indicator of social status and recognition. In doing so they also open the door to the more rational, equitable and human use of our natural resources that is, as argued above, vital if the existential environmental threat is to be avoided.
The technological threat is another matter altogether, for it is not a rational outcome of the interplay between man and his production relations: it requires a change in human nature itself. If humans are happiest and most creative when under no compulsion to labour – when labour is not work – we can expect that the pressure to expand real freedom will lead to an exponential increase in technological and other innovations. Unless – but substantially more difficult and perhaps impossible to accomplish – this technological threat is recognised and human nature is adjusted to accommodate it; developments in technology – at this juncture AI in particular – may constitute the real existential threat.
