Dear Friends,
It seems to me… creation is the future of the human race. With the coming zero unit cost of labor, creativity will be the one human attribute that will always be of value. This is because when everything is almost free, we will pay handsomely for art, innovation and rarities. There will always be a need for people to manage the robot workforce, and that ability will become increasingly more complex as time goes on, but the vast majority will have an avenue open to them for profit, in their creativity. Far from starving millions to death, the zero unit cost of labor will simply elevate the profitable means of production, from meeting needs to meeting wants. As long as government doesn’t get in the way, to bolster the profits of zombie companies, with heaps of political favor.
If anything like Moore’s Law happens in robotics, the next twenty years will bring startling new innovations. Today, the technology exists to make a humanoid robot capable of operating in one’s home, as an assistant. That technology is distributed across several companies however and would need to coalesce into one firm for such a thing to be fabricated. That they exist at all shows the inevitability of them coming together to become an actual servant robot. Once one is made the practical uses will wash in like a tsunami. What would help the process along would be for government to create a standard for interconnectivity of components. Such a standard would open the floodgates to innovation and thus economic opportunities for entrepreneurs as well.
Today, those with an IQ less than eighty three are basically unemployable. As the unit cost of labor decreases, due to advances in robotics, that IQ level will rise. Slowly at first but faster as the trend goes matures. The more a robot can do efficiently the less demand there will be for humans to do those jobs. Dirty and dangerous jobs will be the first to go. Safer and more tedious jobs will be next. Eventually, all manual labor, other than creation, and managment, will be done by robots. This means that as the abilities of robots increase, the utility of humans in those fields that require ever more intellect will decrease. Eventually even lawyers, judges and doctors will be replaced with robots, that will do the job exponentially better. The only job where a robot cannot replace a human being is creation.
Creativity however, is distributed differently than IQ, and as such, when the zero unit cost of labor really kicks in, the value of pure creativity could surpass that of a high IQ. Many of the smartest people have no imagination, while many people with little else, have vivid imaginations. Given the future value of creativity, while intelligence will always be utile in managing robots, scientific inquiry, exploration, war fighting, etc… creativity will eventually overtake intellect as the greatest predictor of economic outcome. In light of this, wouldn’t it seem logical for schools to give the opportunity for students to study all forms of art, including industrial arts, to jump start the creativity that will be the driver of the new wave of creative destruction, after the robotic revolution.
The real advantage for creativity however, will be the zero unit cost of labor itself, allowing the poorest to create anything their imaginations can envision… within reason. Of course much absurdity will be created. The quality of which would probably be distributed on a Pareto curve. If so, the number of works of true worth then can be predicted, by the number of tries. Give a million tries and the square root might be a thousand masterworks, given a billion tries and the square root would be nearer thirty two thousand works of superior quality. If the cost of trying becomes so low, it is irrelevant, creativity would become the greatest game going, making people otherwise unable to engage in the market system, our future billionaires. All due to the next wave of creative destruction… robotics.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
