Too Many Questions

Don't ask, don't tell?

I. We all float down here.

The coffee shop where I’m sitting isn’t exactly Starbucks (I don’t go to Starbucks per se but I still like the idea of going to Starbucks), but it might as well be. It has all the same things a name-brand Starbucks has. You see, I’m boycotting Starbucks, so I come here instead, to a knock-off with slightly different product names, situated on a slightly different street corner, aimed at a slightly different demographic (yuppies with a punk aesthetic in this case, as opposed to yuppies with a yuppy aesthetic for Starbucks).

This place was built in about three months and then immediately settled into the modern American suburban tapestry — you know the one, that 6-lane street lined with chain restaurants, chain car washes, chain brake shops, and strip malls that’s been copied and pasted so many times it’s starting to lose just a bit of the novelty.

My chair is a little uncomfortable, but it’s sitting on four legs, which is more than I can say for the table, which rocks back and forth with every keystroke, unsure about which three of its feet to stand on. It’s annoying, but it’s a small annoyance. The problem is it’s just one of myriad small annoyances — music that’s a hair too loud for conversation, cold white LED lights that flicker just fast enough to be nauseating without giving off any visual queues, air conditioning that cools me (and my coffee) just a little too quickly — that make me wonder. Make me ask Questions.

That has always been my problem. I ask too many questions. I’ve known this about myself since my dad told me so decades ago, and it doesn’t seem to be just a phase. Right now, I’m asking, “Why is the goddamn music so loud I can’t hear myself think?” Even the baristas have to yell at each other to get their jobs done. This place doesn’t sound like a coffee shop, it sounds like an elementary school cafeteria where someone with several boomboxes is serenading 25 disinterested 5th graders with Joan Jett.

It should be a rhetorical question, if it’s asked at all. I mean, maybe everyone else likes the music this loud and I’m just a Grumpy Old Man. But when you take all these little annoyances together — the music, the lights, this wobbly table, the temperature, plus the lack of napkins and creamer at the coffee station, the bathroom you have to ask for permission to use, and five or ten other little things — it almost feels like this isn’t a coffee shop at all, but a vending machine disguised as a coffee shop.

It isn’t here to provide a space to work or hang out, it’s here to take your money. Yes, you technically are allowed to stick around, but that’s just part of the facade. Nobody built this place because they like coffee or coffee drinkers. They built it because they figured if they put a dollar in, they’d get five dollars back. Like everything else on this carbon-copied suburban drag, it’s a gimmick and a racket.

Of course, that much is fairly obvious. I mean, BREAKING NEWS: BUSINESS EXISTS FOR BUSINESS REASONS isn’t going to win a Pulitzer, is it. I don’t blame this coffee shop for the evils of — horror — selling coffee. That isn’t really the question I’m asking. It isn’t even really a problem that the way it sells coffee is by pretending to be a community center.

II. The Last Sucker

The thing is, this coffee shop isn’t alone in its pretense. It seems like everything is pretending to be the thing we need it to be, instead of actually being that thing. Grocery stores pretend to sell food, but really they’re just shoveling over-processed and over-hyped Products at us. Houses pretend to be homes, but really they’re shoddy, slapdash affairs thrown together to be sold, not to be lived in. Hospitals pretend to provide healthcare, while they’re really there to supply their billing departments with raw materials in the form of the sick and dying. Jobs pretend to provide a living, insurance pretends to safeguard our finances, landlords pretend to provide shelter, police pretend to protect and serve, and electric cars pretend to be eco-friendly.

And we just… accept all this. As if it’s normal. Glue a cheap veneer of bricks on a stucco facade and pretend the third Little Pig built it to defy the Wolf. Accepting all of this pretense at face value is what’s expected of us. We’re not supposed to ask our boss why we can’t pay the rent — that’s our problem, not his. We’re not supposed to ask our insurance why they keep denying our claims. Or the police why they are, statistically, more likely to commit a crime than solve one. Asking too many questions, as I’m constitutionally prone to doing, can be dangerous. To one’s health, one’s wallet, and even one’s life if one takes it too far.

But why does any of this matter? People have been making a quick buck by slinging cheap knock-offs of cheap knock-offs ever since Ea-Nasir ran a substandard copper outlet in Ur. It is, we are supposed to believe, the way of the world. Getting yours at the expense of the other guy, even if it means being a little shady, isn’t just human nature. It’s the American Way. Besides, that other guy is free to pass it along, isn’t he? If he doesn’t pull himself up, that’s on him. And if enough of us don’t like the way things are, well, that’s why George Washington gave us Democracy. We can change it any time we want. Right?

Well, not exactly. See, the thing about a succession of suckers is it can’t go on forever. There just aren’t an infinite number of suckers. Eventually, you get to the last poor bastard in line and when he turns his pockets out, they’re just empty.

Over the last few decades, our great big economy has begun to sway a bit. Businesses on the bottom half of the economic ladder, unable to compete for materials and talent with giant multinationals like Amazon or Boeing, have been gobbled up. All the media in the country is owned by four or five big media companies. Our food is almost entirely produced by two or three agricultural conglomerates. See also: housing, medicine, aircraft, you name it.

And, as every industry in every sector of the economy gets consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, we have less and less of the stuff that really makes Capitalism tick — competition, new markets, and revolutionary products.

Take the smartphone as an example: when the iPhone came out, it revolutionized communication. Then, every year, some great new capability was added that made that year’s phone an absolute necessity. But this year’s iPhone is essentially last year’s with some marketing slapped on top. They’re down to making a big deal about a millimeter of thickness or whatever. Sure, you’ll update your phone eventually, but you’re not going to get in a line around the block on release day. You might not even get next year’s phone at all.

And it isn’t just cell phones. There’s a marked decrease in real innovation across the board. Cars, computers, farm equipment, even medicine. The need to keep updating our gear is simply slowing down. And what do the conglomerates do to rectify this? Dump cash into R&D? No. Why would they do that? There’s hardly any competition, and what little there is isn’t pushing forward very fast anyway.

Instead, we get cheaper and less durable products, subscription plans, exploding prices, and increasingly frivolous dodads and whatsits tacked on top for premium charges, usually powered by buggy software. New hardware “advances” mainly exist just to add artificial requirements so you can’t simply run the fancy new features on last year’s model.

In short — we are running out of ideas. And not just that, we are running out of the need for real ideas, and even if we had them, people are running out of the money they’d need to buy into those new ideas if they existed. And what do you think happens to an economy — and the society it runs — when it’s based on consumer demand, and it runs out of both consumers and demand? What happens when the Last Sucker is drained?

III. The Robot Revolution

Sure, you say, that could be bad, but haven’t you heard? We’re about to float off into a post-scarcity economy when we add AI to the mix! Everything will be free and there will be plenty of profits to go around! I am very smart, you say, as Bitcoin balloons another thousand dollars. See? Surely, technological utopia is just about here, and it’s ready to fix all this stuff about supply and demand or whatever.

Whenever I hear otherwise intelligent people say things like this about AI, I am honestly stumped, and my bothersome tendency to Ask Too Many Questions rears its ugly head again. For starters, what do people think the logic is here, exactly? Besides asking too many questions, I’m also really good at being sarcastic, so let me take a step back and see if I can summarize what I think the argument is.

1. AI is pretty good, and will eventually be really great, at doing most of the kinds of work that need to get done — robotic, or “embodied” AI, to cook, clean, build, and maintain physical things; and cognative, or “generative” AI to write code, make decisions, generate entertainment and educational content, discover new medicines, etc. Let’s just assume that there’s an AI-enabled category for just about every job.

2. This AI will be as costly or (hopefully) much less costly than human labor for doing all of these things, or at least much less error-prone and fast enough to continue the general economic trend of growth and innovation.

3. Therefore, companies will naturally tend to replace human workers with AI. This will give AI adopters an advantage in the market, which will drive everyone to either adopt AI, or die out.

4. Humans are now free to pursue their hopes and dreams, unburdened from the yoke of perpetual employment and the rat race. Hooray!

5. Alternatively, mysterious “new” jobs will be created for humans to do, that are both exempt from further AI takeover and don’t threaten the notion of AI doing all meaningful labor.

Is that at least generally correct? If so, I have to wonder whether the people who foresee this future live on the same planet that I live on. Because I don’t see AI going in this direction at all. It also makes some serious miscalculations about the entire purpose of AI, in my analysis. Where a lot of people — experts and otherwise, economists and otherwise — see AI as the next, and perhaps last technological revolution, I see something more profound, and a lot more dystopian.

To understand my view of AI, you have to understand a little bit about my view of the economy. That’s really why I started this piece by complaining about coffee shops and the veneer of civilization spray-tanned onto speculative business modles. I’ll try to boil it down to a few points here.

1. Capitalism is very good at what it does — that is, it very efficiently accumulates capital in the hands of business owners. That is all it does, though. It doesn’t “distribute resources efficiently” or “innovate faster”. Those are side effects that are sometimes true, sometimes not true. Whether those things happen depends solely on what needs to happen in order for capital to accumulate with the economic elites.

2. Over time, as the economy has been consolidated into a decreasing number of increasingly large conglomerates, the ability to generate new capital has dwindled. There are fewer new markets — both geographical and conceptual — in which to fill niches and collect revenue. There are fewer consumers, as birth rates stabilize and then fall, and as wages stagnate and purchasing power collapses. There are fewer colonial territories with fewer resources available for extraction.

3. Capitalism must grow to survive. Without new customers, new markets, new materials, new technologies, and new ideas with which to disrupt existing models, there is no growth. And if there is no growth, there is no new capital to feed into the system to keep it going.

4. We have spent decades trying to patch these holes in the Capitalist boat:

   1. Privatization turns basic needs into subscription services — less effective, more expensive, and designed to funnel our money out of our communities.

   2. Deregulation allows more efficient wealth extraction by decreasing the cost of overhead, oversight, and safety infrastructure.

   3. Financialization of markets allows bankers to place bets not just on goods and services, but on other bets about goods and services, and on bets on bets on bets, and so on. This inflates capital, but it doesn’t actually produce anything.

   4. Occasionally (or literally all the time, you know how Those People are), we have a war that bombs some poor country into the Stone Age so they can pay us to rebuild it.

   5. We blame immigrants for keeping wages low, while keeping wages low even after we get rid of them.

   6. And so on.

5. Unfortunately, none of these things can actually fix the problem forever, because the problem is intrinsic to Capitalism: We must grow at all costs, but resources, time, space, and humans are finite resources. Eventually, no matter how many backflips we do, we will run out of one or more of those resources.

6. The elites are not fools. They understand all this. They might disagree on just how long the bandaids will hold, or on which bandaid will have which effect, but ultimately they know the score. Capitalism has these internal contradictions that simply cannot be sustained forever.

And that is the problem the elites need to solve. The endless flow of money coming out of the developing world is drying up. The flow of ideas from labs and academia is slowing to a crawl. Workers are reaching the end of their ropes. And while productivity is through the roof, all that extra value is needed by the system itself just to keep lumbering through history. Human beings are being ground to pulp by the economic machine, but it still requires even more.

That is, we need more workers to produce more things for more consumers to buy for higher prices. And that has always worked out fine. Except now, we need to produce more things than there are workers physically existing who can produce them, and it’s only getting worse. So we need something to keep the cycle going, and that is where AI comes in.

What if we could simply get the machine to run itself? Well, that would be fine. Robots to make things, robots to buy things. When we need more, we just dial it up a notch. Presto! Perpetual economic motion. Nothing needs to change, we just need to swap out one part for another.

We need to get rid of human labor.

Hooray, you say! Exactly what I’ve been saying! No more work!

Except… why, exactly, would the elites pay us to not produce anything? They hardly pay us anything when we do produce things for them. There are a lot of ideas here, of course. Universal Basic Income, for example. Just take some of that gravy from the gravy train, and spread it around. But — I’m asking you seriously here — why would they do that, when they could just.. not do that?

What part of this economic equation requires them to spare us the indignity of simply lying down in the gutter, or a ditch somewhere in Guantanamo, or Gaza, or Cleveland for that matter, and just… disappearing? Their humanity?

And it is an equation to them. They tell us all the time with their facts and figures. GDP is growing. Profits are soaring. Lines and numbers go up. When was the last time you had a day as good as the average day on Wall Street? Are you a number? Are they even talking to you? Of course they’re not. Because in their minds, we have already disappeared. Why do you think they take such offense at homeless encampments, and border-crossers, and even people who dye their hair blue and stand out too much? Because we aren’t people to them, we are a teeming, unstable, messy mass of not-numbers. If their numbers are going to keep going up, we have to go down.

IV. Living the Dream

The coffee shop down the street stands empty now, just like almost all the houses around it. Hard to sell coffee to people who aren’t around anymore, no matter how steady you make the tables. It’s been six months since the factory driving this town was switched over to 100% automation — not even the management kept their jobs, that’s all done remotely now from some office building in Dubai. Which is also mostly empty, for what it’s worth.

People weren’t happy, of course. A few of them tried to make a scene about it downtown, but there was nobody there who could do anything about it even if they’d been listening. And they hadn’t been listening, they’d been on the phone with the cops, who swept in with riot gear and took care of that unsightly little problem on the street. Most of the blood is probably washed away by now.

Six months. And already, this once buzzing main drag through our suburb looks like those photos of abandoned Soviet towns. Nature, strained as she is by world events, is taking back over. A few cars whiz by now and then, the only sign that civilization, of a sort, continues in this ghost town. Can’t say what those people do to stay afloat — maybe they’re somehow holding on to one of the few jobs for humans around here, which would make them off-duty cops most likely. But I imagine even they will have to move on when the last grocery store shuts down. Can’t be much more money in real food than there is in synthetic coffee these days.

Whoever they are, you can be sure they’re Good Citizens. We all know well enough by now not to rock the boat. The AI didn’t just take over the factory, it’s also running the surveillance drones and traffic cameras. All that feeds into the regional governance office, which is one place that’s definitely still staffed by people. If you can call them people. I have my doubts, what with the summary execution warrants and the standing search and seizure orders, but what do I know. Nothing I’d ever say out loud, that’s for sure.

This truly is the American Dream, though. Houses are affordable again, if you happen to still be alive and employed somehow. If not, well, I guess you don’t need housing anyway. Still, even after everything, there still seems to be an air of impending doom lingering over it all. I’m not the only one who feels it, either. The news has never run out of stuff to fret about. Some trouble in the Middle East, as usual. Trouble on Wall Street, too, if you can believe it. I guess the fun never stops.

V. Sunrise in the East

Even if the elites manage to quell every rebellion, shore up every failing corporation, and replace every last human worker with a guaranteed obedient AI-powered labor drone, the fact is this system simply will not last. It’ll outlast the majority of us, to be sure, but eventually, it will collapse.

I don’t say that because I am some kind of starry-eyed optimist (though you’d be forgiven for thinking that given how upbeat this has all been), but because I am a believer in mathematics. The Empire is eating itself. Thu numbers don’t work anymore, so the only solution is to hollow out the machine until there’s nothing left.

So what can you do? What could we have done, instead? They have told us that Capitalism is the only viable economic model. Everything else fails. Look at the USSR. Look at Venezuela. Cuba. Just… please, God, don’t look at China. That might make you ask Too Many Questions.