Artificial intelligence has received more and more attention in recent years. At the start of 2017, Google Master has won 60 games in a row in the online game of Go, beating many of humanity’s top players. In the fourth season of Jiangsu TV’s The Brain, Baidu’s facial recognition technology impressed many viewers with its surprising appearance. Artificial intelligence is essentially the extension of human intelligence, is to use computers to simulate the way of human thinking. The rapid development of artificial intelligence is not a gimmick, it will greatly promote the development of productivity, labor, employment and even a decisive impact on the social system.
Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
In the past five years, AI has made more progress than in the previous 50 years combined, thanks to major breakthroughs in its algorithms. Chinese speech recognition, for example, was once considered an insurmountable obstacle. Not so long ago, in 2002, a professor from the Department of Automation at the University of Science and Technology of China admitted to me that his team, though on the front lines of research, had not yet found a clue to an efficient algorithm for speech recognition. In other words, it was not clear by what mechanism people understood speech. More than a decade later, deep learning based on neural network has solved the professor’s doubts — the Chinese speech recognition rate of the input method developed by IFlyTEK reaches 97%, which is almost the same as the real person.
Daimler’s self-driving truck is being tested on a highway in Nevada in the US. A revolution in the transportation industry is on the horizon.
Even Chinese speech recognition is small beer compared to the massive impact artificial intelligence has had in other fields. Self-driving technology, for example, is about to revolutionize the transportation industry. The autopilot system does not nod off, is distracted, needs no rest, and is not emotional. It is foreseeable that mature autonomous driving systems will far surpass traditional drivers in terms of reliability. U.S. automaker Tesla has taken the lead in autonomous driving technology, but Chinese companies such as JAC Are catching up.
What does mature self-driving technology mean? Passengers enter an address and the car automatically pulls them to their destination with the help of satellite navigation. At that time, 2.6 million taxi drivers [1] in China and 234,000 taxi drivers [2] in the United States will be at risk of losing their jobs, and the term “substant money” will become a thing of the past forever. It’s not just taxi drivers who are about to lose their jobs to autonomous driving. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States, and 8.7 million truck workers if technical support workers are included [3]. In China, the number is as high as 30 million, or one in 45 Chinese people. Daimler’s self-driving trucks have been on the road for testing since 2015 [4]. Judging from the rapid development progress, it will only be a few years before self-driving trucks reach mass production. What should the tens of millions of truckers do then?
The MG-1S agricultural plant protection uav recently launched by DJI innovation can spray pesticides more beautifully than humans. Soon, crops will have to give in to artificial intelligence.
Ai is upending not just transportation, but agriculture, which has been around for thousands of years. In the near future, farmers will no longer need to roll up their pants and go to work during the busy farming season. A few farm workers will be able to get things done by tapping on their computers. This is no fancy, and research has already begun. In 2011, The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Mechanization Science has completed the significant experiment of automatic navigation of agricultural machinery [5] : The rice transplanter equipped with automatic control system can obtain vehicle attitude information according to GPS and on-board sensors to realize automatic navigation and ground steering. The experimental results show that the automatic transplanter can walk in the field according to the preset path and meet the precision requirement of transplanting rice seedlings. The success of the study means that automated field operations are technically feasible and can be rolled out as long as the cost of use is reduced. Uav pesticide spraying technology is even more mature [6] : compared with manual spraying, UAV can reduce pesticide use by about 20%, and there is no need to consider the risk of pesticide poisoning. At the end of November 2016, DJI launched the advanced MG-1S agricultural plant protection UAV, whose flight operation is more convenient and stable, making pesticide spraying more accurate and efficient, and fully entering the stage of practical application.
It may not be long before we see unmanned agricultural machinery and drones working tirelessly in the fields, with the planning of field management left to computers equipped with expert systems [7] : Sensors distributed in the field transmit real-time data such as soil moisture, soil chemical composition, temperature and light intensity to computers, and then the expert system automatically determines what field management measures to take through algorithms. The amount of water used for irrigation, the amount of fertiliser applied and the best time to pick are all decided by expert systems that combine vast amounts of knowledge and data to manage things with a precision that would put a lifelong farmhand to the test. When ARTIFICIAL intelligence automates agriculture, what will the hundreds of millions of rural people forced to take off the “farmer” label do?
As mentioned above, AI will eliminate the dependence on labor in many industries, freeing up a large working population. How should former drivers leave the cab, former farmers leave the land, and other large numbers of people whose jobs have been eliminated by ARTIFICIAL intelligence survive themselves? This is the challenge that AI brings to social governance. Historically, technological progress has destroyed old jobs as well as created new ones. The spread of cars, for example, wiped out jobs for rickshaws and created jobs for taxi drivers. However, there are two important differences in the impact of AI on employment compared with historical technological advances.
One is the difference in the number of jobs. Ai is not affecting hundreds of thousands of jobs, but tens or even hundreds of millions of jobs. In China alone, AI will affect 30 million truck drivers and more than 200 million rural workers. Historically, technological advances have tended to release labor from old jobs over long periods of time. In the late 19th century, for example, it took three or four decades for steam-powered seamen to completely replace galleons, more than a generation long enough for galleons to move on to new employment. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has the potential to unleash an unprecedented amount of labor in a very short period of time, creating unprecedented changes.
Second, the difference in the quality of employment. Workers freed from old jobs by technological progress need to learn new skills to move into new ones. Historically, the process of labor force learning new skills was not necessarily complicated, as was the case with sailing sailors becoming steam-seamen. So job changes brought about by technological progress are relatively easy to bear. However, ARTIFICIAL intelligence will eliminate low-end jobs full of repetitive labor at a very fast speed. By October 2016, Foxconn, the major contract manufacturer of Apple Inc., had deployed 40,000 robots in its factories in Mainland China to replace assembly line workers [8]. In the foreseeable future, ARTIFICIAL intelligence will eventually lead to the disappearance of traditional labor-intensive industries. Jobs that require creativity, such as scientists and corporate r&d, as well as jobs with high skill complexity, such as lawyers and doctors, are relatively difficult to replace by AI and will remain in the long run.
And here’s the question:
? A large number of low-end jobs displaced by AI have freed up a less educated workforce.
? High-end jobs, which are not easily challenged by ARTIFICIAL intelligence, have high barriers to entry, and are almost a pile of academic degrees or practical experience.
? The new jobs created by AI, such as those related to the maintenance and upgrading of AI, will definitely require higher education.
This means that the large amount of labor released by AI in a short period of time will not easily enter other jobs and be naturally absorbed by society. Getting a Foxconn assembly line worker to become an IT engineer is probably no easier than getting a jinshi in ancient times. Even if these workers are willing to work hard to acquire new skills, they face another huge obstacle — the cost of education.
Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.
Capitalism has turned education into a naked business, with high quality educational resources being bought for large sums of money, as is most evident in the United States. Tuition at elite American universities is generally not cheap, charging more than $1,000 per credit hour. At a conservative cost of $1,000 per credit, a master’s degree would require at least 30 credits and cost at least $30,000. An already hard-pressed workforce that has been involuntarily unemployed pays $30,000 of its own money for the possibility of re-employment.
This system means that the cost of re-acquiring skills is extremely high, which inevitably leads to a situation where many people cannot acquire new skills because they are too poor to receive education; Lack of Labour skills condemns them to long-term unemployment, exacerbating poverty. When advanced ARTIFICIAL intelligence destroys low-end jobs, a large number of labor forces will be released without the value of “exploited surplus value”, resulting in long-term isolation from the job market. Can society be harmonious if large numbers of people of working age are marginalised in this way?
The huge impact of ARTIFICIAL intelligence on labor and employment will further constitute a macroeconomic shock. The famous Indian writer Krishan. Jandal (1914 ~ 1977) discussed this problem in his novel The Fallen Tree. The fantasy plot of The Fallen Tree is more like an allegory with some realism [9] :
The protagonist climbs down a fallen tree in his backyard and arrives at a strange city. The city is full of automated services — driving, filling up, cooking and checking out dazzle the protagonist. (I have to admire the rich imagination of the writer, bringing up things that only appeared decades later.) But there were no people in the big city. Finally the hero finally met a teenager – the only inhabitant of the city.
The boy tells the reason why the city is desolate: his father used to be the owner of the city and a business owner who employed tens of thousands of workers. He was given a powerful new machine that could do the work of not one but a hundred workers. So he pushed new machines into the factory and laid off workers. Out of every 100 workers, only one was left in charge of the machinery, and the other 99 were dismissed. As a result, the more machines there are, the more unemployment there is, and the more people starve to death in the cities every day.
Eventually all the work was done by machines, and the city dwellers were left jobless, impoverished and starved to death. Finally one day there was a great famine. There was plenty of food in the market, but people had no money to buy it — tens of thousands starved to death in a matter of days. Many people were killed because of the rebellion, and the rest fled the city. In the end, only the boy and his parents were left in the city. As a result, the boy’s father committed suicide in despair — the profits were made not from machines but from people; With no one to spend, he can no longer make a profit.
This profound parable actually predicts the negative social impact of artificial intelligence under the logic of capital. Enterprises dominated by capital logic all try to minimize labor costs and maximize surplus value [10]. Artificial intelligence, which helps to hire as few people as possible, is an invaluable tool for that purpose. However, corporate profits depend on household consumption, which is based on labor income. From another point of view, the enterprise’s human cost expenditure is actually the labor income of employees. If all enterprises reduce labor costs to the extreme, the total amount of labor income of the whole society will decrease, which will lead to sluggish consumption and make it difficult for enterprises to make profits. Enterprises that are difficult to make profits hope to rely on layoffs to get out of trouble, while the increase of the unemployed population further reduces the total social labor income, further shrinks consumption, and makes it harder for enterprises to make profits — this vicious cycle is the capitalist economic crisis described by Marxist political economy. Just as Lenin said [11] : The technological progress that increases labor productivity and social wealth under the capitalist system aggravates social inequality and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. As a result, more and more working people are deprived of life security, and unemployment and suffering of all kinds are aggravated.
Objectively speaking, the widening gap between the rich and the poor falls into the category of relative poverty because the social welfare system was established in capitalist countries after World War II, but even the middle and lower classes of the society still had enough to eat. However, artificial intelligence is very likely to rapidly eliminate low-end jobs after pushing up unemployment, making the life of the lower and middle classes of the society “not the same as before”, or even “precarious”, thus creating the extremely terrible “absolute poverty”.
Historically, the absolute poverty of a large number of people is the direct cause of social unrest. The soil of all the peasant wars in our history was the absolute impoverishment of the peasant class. The great Depression of 1929-1933 brought about the absolute impoverishment of the proletariat and enabled the Nazi Party to come to power on a populist platform. The impact of AI on the social system may be no less than that of the Great Depression: AI may not only make the middle and lower classes in developed countries face absolute poverty, but also make the majority of developing countries lose the advantage of low labor cost, thus ultimately destroying the low-end manufacturing industry in developing countries. As a result, the huge uneducated population of developing countries will be reduced to the “garbage population” of no significance to the developed countries, and the whole world capitalist system will be plunged into an unprecedented crisis.
Ironically, the flaws of the capitalist system are magnified by the enormous productivity produced by capitalist societies. Tech companies such as Google and Tesla, which have been working so hard to develop ARTIFICIAL intelligence, may not realize that their efforts could be a time bomb that could bring down the world’s capitalist system. After the great crisis and collapse brought by artificial intelligence, human beings will eventually establish a more progressive social system to continue civilization on the ruins of capitalism, which is the path pointed out by Lenin — the transition from state capitalism to socialism.
Productivity determines relations of production, and ai will only bring universal welfare under a more progressive social system. The progressive nature of the new social system will be reflected in the following aspects:
1. Negate the capital logic that regards capital as the center of social and economic rights, eliminate the primary distribution mode of distribution according to factors of production, and comprehensively implement distribution according to work. The allocation of factors of production inevitably leads to capital accumulation at a much faster rate than wage growth, creating a perpetual divide between the haves and the have-nots, as Mr Piketty’s capital in the twenty-first Century explains in detail. Only distribution according to work can ensure the synchronous growth of labor income and labor productivity, and solve the contradiction between overproduction and insufficient consumption that leads to economic crisis.
2. The State provides comprehensive and free education and vocational training to the general public. The state will guide the transfer of labor force among various sectors of the national economy in an orderly manner, and citizens do not need to pay extra costs for acquiring new labor skills. Only in this way can people find it difficult to obtain employment because they cannot obtain labor skills.
3. Establish a reasonable social division of labor and transfer payment mechanism. Artificial intelligence will greatly improve labor productivity, people only need to spend a little time in production, can meet the material needs of life, then people will be able to re-divide the social division according to their ability and interest:
Thanks to ARTIFICIAL intelligence, people with higher intelligence levels can get rid of repetitive work and concentrate on creative work, such as scientific and technological research, or artistic creation such as literature, film and drama. The base of people engaged in creative labor will be greatly increased, so that the science and art of mankind will present an unprecedented prosperity.
As mentioned above, AI has reduced the proportion of people in the labor force who are directly engaged in productive work, eliminating the need for many workers and farmers. What should the freed labor do? The most reasonable direction is to turn labor to service and care for people, to meet people’s emotional needs. Human beings are the sum total of social relationships, and human communication is destined to be unable to be replaced by artificial intelligence. Therefore, in the era of the popularization of artificial intelligence, there should be more psychological consultants, preschool teachers, rehabilitation doctors, elderly care and other service jobs. At that time, office workers will not encounter the dilemma of “sudden business trip, no one to take care of the children at home”, and professional trained service personnel will come to take care of them.
One hundred years after the October Revolution, Lenin’s thought illuminates the future. The productivity gains brought about by ARTIFICIAL intelligence will eventually lead to new social institutions
Those employed in creative labor and service jobs do not directly produce material means of living and their income sources actually depend on the transfer payment mechanism of the state. In fact, there are some such transfer payment mechanisms. For example, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and teachers in public schools are paid by fiscal revenue. However, the transfer payment under the new social system will be more universal and more perfect, forming a reasonable distribution of surplus value within the whole society.
Many historical processes were actually triggered by technological progress, and this became more evident after the Industrial Revolution. For example, Germany achieved rapid industrialization in the late 19th century, leading the world in heavy industry technology such as metallurgy, shipbuilding and machining, which emboldened the German rulers to launch two world wars. As a technological advance that can greatly increase labor productivity, AI is bound to trigger a series of major historical processes. The 21st century is destined to be a magnificent era, let us wait and see.