Capacity of consciousness in the AI era

Let us assume a future in which AI and robots take over all labor, and, if we are really lucky, distributive justice is also achieved. I think the former is relatively easy and the latter is the difficult and important part, but in any case, assuming both are achieved, I wrote down some rambling thoughts on what values human beings would still consider important.

Supplement

The above premise (AI and robots take over all labor and distributive justice is achieved) is only a hypothesis. The purpose of this piece is not to assess the likelihood that such a premise will be achieved, nor to make a value judgment about whether a society in which that premise is achieved would be a good society. It is simply speculation about a future in which such a premise has been achieved.

Wage slavery

Before talking about the future, let me briefly talk about the present. I think wage labor under the capitalist system is in fact virtually no different from slavery (wage slavery).

From the capitalist’s point of view, owning slaves is inefficient in many ways, so instead of ownership, access—in other words, the form of a wage contract—is preferred. There is a similar aspect to what Jeremy Rifkin argued in The Age of Access. The difference, however, is that rather than a structure in which consumers depend on the networks of giant capital, this is a structure in which capitalists depend on workers.

At the same time, the capitalist’s dependence on the worker did not arise from the transition from ownership to access; it existed from the beginning (Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the capitalist-worker dialectic in Marx derived from it). The difference from the Hegel-Marx dialectic is that in today’s labor contract, the possibility of workers overturning the system has been almost completely neutered.

In the end, wage labor seems to be an ideal slavery that increases efficiency from the capitalist’s point of view while significantly eliminating the possibility of subversion arising from dependence on workers. If, on top of that, the idea that “labor is a sacred duty and a right” is instilled, it becomes an even more powerful means of rule.

Liberation from wage labor

Most people who perform wage labor live with their quality of experience greatly constrained. Accordingly, under conditions in which most of one’s time except sleeping is devoted to labor, one comes to think about ways to raise the quality of experience: regarding labor itself as sacred, actually making labor sacred, or trying to minimize labor time as much as possible, and so on.

If everyone is liberated from wage labor and distributive justice is achieved, so that the quality of each individual’s experience is no longer constrained by social class, then our experience will be limited only by each individual’s capacity to experience (hereafter, let us call this “capacity of consciousness”). Each individual’s capacity of consciousness alone becomes the factor that limits the total amount of cultural capital that person can accumulate.

Capacity of consciousness will likely be influenced by heredity, learning (in a broad sense), and enhancement through various medical or instrumental interventions, and, just as in the rich-get-richer dynamics of the capitalist system, there may well be a positive feedback loop. The defects of meritocracy may also remain entirely intact.

The instinct to compare

Unless everyone takes something like the soma in the novel Brave New World, the human psychology of comparing ourselves to others, competing, and envying will probably not disappear.

What resources would still be scarce in an age when all labor and production have been automated, and thus still be the kind of thing people compare and show off to one another? The aforementioned capacity of consciousness (the capacity to experience), and the cultural capital accumulated on its basis, seem likely to become such a “resource.” One’s outstanding capacity of consciousness, the deep and varied experiences one has built up with that capacity, and the experience of having spent time in the same physical space with a person who has accumulated such experiences, and the cultural capital built up even more deeply as a result. Might not these become resources worth showing off?

In fact, even now, people who are already (relatively) liberated from labor live this way. For example, to appreciate contemporary art, which is becoming increasingly difficult to understand, one must accumulate considerable knowledge, and this is a kind of “conspicuous knowledge” similar to the conspicuous consumption spoken of by Thorstein Veblen. And behavior that reveals that one knows how to consume such art becomes an effective signal for showing off one’s high capacity of consciousness (costly signaling theory).

Marx

Come to think of it, Marx also made related speculations in the 19th century.

He argues that all human senses have been degraded by private property. For instance, the value of a mineral is judged not by its beauty in itself but by the market value of the gemstone. According to Marx, in a state alienated by private property, humans cannot understand the value of things except by possessing them or using them as means to other ends, and only by abolishing private property do they come to see the world properly. Just as only someone who knows music can appreciate it, he says that only a non-alienated social human being will be able to properly appreciate the world. (Reference: Marx: A Very Short Introduction)

Inequality due to differences in capacity of consciousness

If I continue the thought by adding to Marx’s speculation, it goes like this.

Marx seems to have thought that, once the communist revolution were completed, private property abolished, and humans liberated from alienated labor, human creativity would explode and inequality would also be resolved.

But just because institutions or culture change does not mean human nature, or its expression, would completely change. Depending on the culture, some people drink beer and others drink wine, but in no culture do people drink petroleum. Human beings are quite flexible physically and mentally, but not infinitely flexible.

Humans will still compare themselves to one another, compete, and envy; it is just that the values they regard as important will shift from “property” to something else. In other words, would it not be more accurate to say that the site of competition would merely move from the market into the realm of consciousness?

The speculation that humans liberated from alienated labor would become able to experience the world better seems valid. But there will still be factors that constrain human experience, and the most important limiting factor among them will be each individual’s capacity of consciousness. Even if everyday life becomes superabundant, XR devices or BCI devices like Neuralink push good content into the five senses, and smart AI endlessly injects advanced knowledge into humans, there will still be differences in the capacity of consciousness individual human beings have to digest all this, and might not this difference become the seed of another kind of inequality and stratification?

Without a sound approach to constructively handling the ranking and distinction-making embedded in human nature, even if AI and robots take over all labor and, if we are really lucky, distributive justice is achieved, it seems there would still be many paths wide open that lead to dystopia.