A: KATHERINE ELKINS | Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities JON CHUN | Visiting Instructor of Humanities, Affiliated Scholar in Scientific Computing
For most of human history, automation has dramatically increased our material comfort, wealth and well-being, freeing humans from the “3 Ds” of “dull, dirty and dangerous” work while providing new and more stimulating work opportunities. The majority of us believe our jobs will remain immune, and that automation will augment rather than replace human labor.
But recently, anxiety about automation has increased. Automation is suspected of playing a role in the stagnant wage growth and underemployment that has plagued developed economies for the past half century. Artificial Intelligence also is demonstrating the potential to automate almost every human activity.
The newest wave of AI-powered automation is less about automating simple physical labor and more about empowering automation with human-like perception, communication and cognition. Studies have found that up to half of existing jobs are at risk for automation within two decades, and it’s possible AI will outperform humans in all work tasks within 45 years.
Still, some “dull and dirty” jobs pose real challenges to automation. Ironically, AI turns out to be better at manipulating abstract symbols, exploring innovative designs, and sensing human emotions than cleaning toilets. Imagine a future dystopia in which we clean toilets while AI writes symphonies, serializes TV shows and crunches numbers to make life’s important decisions.
What can we do as a society if many of us cannot compete with automation for traditional jobs and new job creation fails to keep pace? Small scale experiments in Universal Basic Income are testing it as a viable alternative to a work-based economy. Taxing robots in proportion to the human labor they replace may preserve government revenue and slow its adoption. Congress has banned self-driving trucks, and human oversight is mandated for data-driven criminal sentencing and medical diagnosis.
Still, there remains the question as to how individuals will reimagine their purpose and identity without work. Automation may force us to rethink the fundamental premises of our economy, laws and ethics as it accelerates wealth concentration, creates vast power imbalances and swiftly outmaneuvers any regulations designed to control it.
We all need to ask and answer these big questions to ensure that an automated world is still one we wish to inhabit. Only in doing so can we determine how to maintain a humanist world in the face of an increasing post-humanist onslaught.
The good news is that physicists have developed complete, tested and verified models of time travel that perfectly explain how objects (including humans!) can, and do, travel through time.
The bad news is that it’s the ultimate one-way street. We constantly are traveling through time, but our velocity in that direction is, with all the unfortunate consequences, unstoppable.
The theories of special and general relativity fully explain the rich physics of how to manipulate the rate at which clocks can tick due to large relative velocities and/or different altitudes — not to mention the even more significant effects of strong gravitational fields or near-light speed travel. It’s unavoidable to draw the analogy between these models and humans’ perception of how quickly time seems to pass; an hour in lecture can seem like a minute or a day depending on your frame of mind.
Understanding time travel, at least in this sense, is more than an academic exercise. The observable consequences of relativity are relevant in many of the processes that we take for granted. For instance, not a day goes by that I don’t rely on my GPS to tell me how long it will take for me to get home. This technology would be useless without a careful understanding of why the clocks on the GPS satellites tick at a (relative) different rate to those we have in our phones.
The great mystery, however, is not the fact that we travel through time in one direction, but rather why we travel in one direction. Macroscopic physics — thermodynamics, to be exact — dictates the rules that compel us forward, and forbid us to travel backwards, through time. On the other hand, microscopic physics has (almost) nothing to say about the choice of early versus late or young versus old. All microscopic laws of physics are time-reversal symmetric, meaning that these laws don’t care if time goes forward or backward. The origin of the arrow of time, the principle that dictates that we bleed after we’re cut, is an open question in physics.
In short, we’re great at time travel; we know a lot about how time works and have harnessed its power in multiple ways. The limitations of this model that get us down, but these same limitations help our GPS get us to where we need to go.