Preparing for a Dystopic Future

For more than half of world’s population, the fundamental means of earning a livelihood has not changed since pre-historic times. Yes, I am talking about that section of our population which earns its livelihood through physical labour – agriculturists and industrial labourers, who form approximately 35% and 22% of the global work-force respectively. Habits have changed, societies have changed, and technologies have changed through millennia, but this section’s reliance on ‘muscular effort’ to earn their livelihood has not changed. But, now there are indications that things are about to change in not-so-distant future, and likely for the worse.

Two factors which can potentially disrupt the whole scenario are (a) climate change, and (b) developments in robotics and artificial intelligence [AI].

Climate change has already been analyzed so much that its impact on our environment, our societies, and our very lives, is now well documented. Within the next few decades, the whole hydrologic-cycle is going to be disrupted (signs are already visible around us). Experts tell us that perennial rivers will run dry, current agrarian lands will become barren, and deserts will witness floods. Huge number of people surviving on subsistence agriculture will find their livelihoods vanishing rapidly.

In short term, there might be threat to our food security – but since the net rainfall will increase, food-grain production from new areas will, in time, compensate for the loss of traditional agricultural lands. However, it is highly improbable that the population surviving on agriculture since forever will be able to migrate to these new agrarian lands – and, most likely, will lose their livelihoods permanently.

Then who will be working on these new fields? Here the recent developments in robotics and AI will come into picture. Recent years have witnessed unprecedented developments in the fields of robotics and AI (which has, surprisingly, escaped popular/media interest). A computer programme – AlphaGo – defeated, in January this year, one of the world’s top-3 ranked player in the ancient Chinese game of Go. (Please note that Go is considered to be a much more algorithmically complex game than Chess – played on a 19×19 board, with 10³⁶⁰ possible moves, against 10¹²³ possible moves in Chess. And it was previously thought that AI will be able to overtake humans in Go not before the year 2030.) Parallel developments are taking place in the field of robotics and automation, with newer robots becoming more and more human in their mechanical dexterity. And for the jobs which nut-and-bolt robots cannot do, bio-hybrid robots are already on the scene. Thus it will not be long before robots capable of tilling the land will be available – and since the new agrarian lands will be in not-so-populated parts of the Earth, it will make more economic sense for the governments/corporates to use them instead of sponsoring large-scale settlement of humans.

But the role of robots will not be limited to the agricultural fields. They have already supplanted humans from the routine but high-precision manufacturing jobs, and will continue to do so for more-and-more complex jobs – more so because they will completely eliminate the Human Resource issues for the corporates, and will make more economic sense.

Without being overly pessimistic, I feel that we are looking at complete loss of livelihood for more than half of the world’s work-force within next two-to-three decades. And re-engagement/re-training/skill-upgradation of the work-force will not be an option, as even the job-opportunities will evaporate. The scale of global upheaval and unrest such events may cause is beyond imagination.

It will not be possible to change or delay the sequence of events. The best we can hope is to mitigate the adverse impacts on our civilization. How? I don’t know… There are no easy answers. Somehow we will have to disengage the access to basic necessities from labour in third world countries (which are going to be the worst affected), through some form of social security.

But these countries will not have financial resources for any programme of this scale. Extreme measures, at global level, will be required for the redistribution of wealth and resources. National boundaries will need to become more permeable, for wealth as well as for populations – and it will no longer be a matter of choice.