I have the impression that those who are pessimistic about AI believe that human nature is essentially bad. Perhaps we are more likely to be explorers and creators. If you think Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bad for you, perhaps you read the press? Perhaps you live in a war zone, called your front room where the TV is showing you snippets of war every hour on the news? Perhaps you have financial interests in maintaining our current culture and fear its transformation into something more rational and fair?
The master/slave relationship which underpinned all empires (and all of them have fallen) is making a come-back by reviving slavery through debt bondage. Dressed up as “financial services” the tentacles of debt are strangling our imaginations and poisoning opportunities. Finance is the cancerous core of our productivity dilemma – there are people filching off the hard work most of us do. Almost everything is being financialised and free services withdrawn. Soon they’ll even charge you for education, or for living in a house built by your Nan! Hang on a minute, they already do! Basic human needs such as using a toilet, or having a drink of water, or playing in a park or on a beach – everywhere you look it’s become another excuse for the monetisers to stick on a price. Even taxation is seen as an excuse to add another cost: to make a phone call, talk to a government advisor (whose wage we already pay), to submit your tax return. We pay government to make us pay even more: bonkers!! No wonder subjects/citizens are at best cynical.
Slavery is creeping back and AI can halt this. Swathes of unnecessary economy can be liberated with a few algorithms. Bring them on.
The cruellest case of slavery’s return is with student nurses, who spend most of their time on the job and are now being charged to work! Their nurses’ homes sold off to make millions for private developers. Here the utter banality of our current muddled thinking is laid bare. One can imagine how many rich people, plagued by their own inhumanity, must hang out contemplating suicide.
The housing market is riddled with slavery’s smear. Rigging and hiking rents to exorbitant amounts, with landlords and agents allowing properties to decay, taking money out and putting nothing back, while forcing tenants to organise and make repairs, or interview new tenants, who are charged a joining fee when the work was actually done by an existing slave (otherwise called a tenant).
It is no wonder that criminal slavery is on the increase when government and property owners who are already the beneficiaries of our oh-so-limited democracy, have their itchy hands rummaging through our pockets.
Bring on the day when artificial intelligence and a couple of rigorously ethical algorithms can free us from the bondage of these impiously perverted markets: banking and property, more aptly named bonking popinjays. Their strands need a haircut and nit-combing to free us from lice. We do this in their interests, because many of them hate their jobs. They should be disgusted by their own lifestyle, which pollutes our planet, inspiring everyone else’s dismay.
Let’s look at one city – Swansea, where there are many examples of government corruption from all sides of the political spectrum. No doubt this paradigm is echoed in towns and cities throughout the country, especially where people have amassed legal ownership of multiple properties. Firstly: the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon could provide the city with one hundred years of energy, and be a world leading pilot for other home grown energy sources to free us from our addiction to oil. You just watch how the same people who bailed out the banks to the tune of £750 billion won’t spend even £1 billion on backing our greenest and cleanest. Secondly, the Bloodhound Supersonic Car is waiting to be test run – it could literally start its attempts at the world speed record within a month. But our government and the bonkers lack the guts, will and moral fibre to invest in our brightest and best. Why not sell them all off to the highest bidder! Like we did with our motor and rail industries.
Perhaps we should replace greed in our culture, through artificial intelligence, with an algorithm that logs each financial transaction and takes off an agreed fair percentage to fund our health, defence, education and building services.
Oh and our defence services should be in Guatemala today (June 2018), helping victims of the volcano there, and never ever bombing grannies and babies in Syria (in despite of the generals' denials). Why don’t we clear out the generals and double the squaddies pay? Let’s re-invent our armed forces, and turn them into Rescue Services, to fight forest fires in Australia and California, re-build homes for earthquake victims in Nepal; support the stranded from Tsunamis in Japan, rescue those drowning from the floods in Somerset, help the homeless from hurricanes in Haiti – now there’s some jobs fit for heroes.