“Welcome my son, welcome to the machine. Where have you been? It’s alright we know where you’ve been.” – Lyrics to Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.”
The glut of nefarious technologies will change man more in the next 200 years than he has changed in the previous 2,000. This can be a conclusion taken from this weekend by scientists discussing the rapid societal impact of the development of robots on mass employment in all sectors, even the sex trade.
“We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at any task,” said Moshe Vardi a computer science professor at Rice University. “Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any can do, what will humans do?”
Humans will probably run out and hide. After all, what use will humans be to a soulless superior creature?
Such a nightmare is, to say the least, some time into the future, but the immediate impact is already being experienced with nearly no pleasant surprises.
The Financial Times was specifically chilling in its assessment of AI’s impact on the future predicting that as many as 200,000 jobs now carried out by humans will be done by A.I. machines in the next half century. This is especially disconcerting during the ongoing debt crisis and considering the fact that sweeping deflation is already causing massive job declines in countries like Canada.
There was more doom and gloom over the weekend, again from Vardi who is also with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):
“[I]f machines will do all our work, we will be free to pursue leisure activities,” Vardi said. But even if the world economic system could be restructured to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure, Vardi questioned whether it would benefit humanity.
“I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human well-being,” he said.
“Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever, which is finding meaning in life after the end of ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’” Vardi said. “We need to rise to the occasion and meet this challenge” before human labor becomes obsolete.
Last year two ultra-geniuses of science were even more pessimistic. Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates went on record stating: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race. It represents our biggest existential threat.” These are some of the greatest minds on earth. They understand scientific models that most minds don’t. When I took physics, I came to an overpowering conclusion early on and that was this: I had no right to be taking up space in physics.
What I do have a knack for, and it’s not the kind brilliance we’ve been talking about, is seeing patterns, particularly in the markets. I’ve had my hat handed to me, especially during big market moves. My late father, C.V. Myers, who was coined one of the three original gold bugs, had the best feel of anyone I’ve ever known for new trends in bonds and stocks and what they were going to do. I had the opportunity to replicate all his trades, but I knew I wouldn’t learn much doing that.
So while I never got his feel for the markets… I got something else — experience. That and not being an idiot has let me learn lessons from 45 years of being in the market. I became experienced. It was this experience that let me finish five times among the top 10 returners for independent newsletter ranker, “Hulbert,” in the first decade of this century when I was the founding editor for John Myers’ Outstanding Investments.
It is this experience that has me convinced that A.I. or not, the world has already started to be whipped by deflation. I want to talk to you more about deflation next week, what the signs are and how you can preserve your wealth, and whether you should even be in the market at all.
Yours in good times and bad,
— John Myers
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