PART NINE
A REFERENDUM
Politicians in search of a quick solution to stave off defeat had often pointed to external demons to divert the discontent of their voters. Economists like Friedman had offered more novel solutions to hard pressed governments, such as monetizing debt … helicopter money, as he put it.
In 2015, David Cameron, to ensure his re-election in the face of a growing numbers of discontented Britons, especially those on fixed incomes, had witlessly offered a scapegoat: Europe. And what better than a referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU, where each and every adult could have his say by marking a cross on voting slip.
Ever accelerating changes were taking their toll in British society where ordinary Brits like Geof and Helene were seduced by Little Englander ideas, seeing Europe and Europeans as swindlers, thieves and villains. It never occurred to them their own politicians were responsible, at least in part, or the fact that almost two million fellow Britons lived outside of the UK in EU countries.
On the one hand they rejected their fellow Europeans in favour of immigrants from the sub-continent or Africa, and on the other they railed against the islamisation of Briton. The two were of course incompatible.
It was in a sense a return to Victorian Britain, when ‘rabies began at Calais’, something confirmed by the ‘Jungle’, and where the Commonwealth appeared like tempting but fading mirage of Empire, leading many into believing it was a credible successor to Europe, offering a seemingly happy alternative to Balts and Bulgars.
Elizabeth II, God bless her, was not Victoria, and stirrings in that strange association called the Commonwealth, and elsewhere, including China, murmured revenge, pointing to England as a nation of imperialists and slave traders to whom they owed no favours.
Immigrants brought with them their own cultural identity, which Samuel R. Huntington described as an idea of self: a concept that was most meaningful to most people. It was not therefore surprising that the newcomers clung to the symbols of their cultural identity. Symbols that clashed with those of the host country; how could the new arrivals not reject their family, heritage and culture, in the same way Britons at home or abroad could not abandon theirs.
Francis agreed with the prediction of John Maynard Keynes, who said in his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, that by 2030, thanks to technological advances, the working week would be reduced to fifteen hours as workers were replaced by machines. It corresponded with Francis’ own vision of Cornucopia. What Francis found more problematic was Keynes’ notion people would enjoy far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied.
Why? To his mind there were a number of reasons. In 1930, when Keynes wrote his essay, the world was a different and simpler place where leisure had a different meaning. In 2015, leisure was a business, and enjoying it cost money. The cost of a ticket for a football match, or a concert, was not within the reach of large segments of the population. The cost of a trip to Disney, or to Ocean World, could be counted in hundreds of dollars for a family. If a working week of fifteen hours in industry existed in developed countries, it would most certainly be for the few. For the rest, those in lower service jobs, it would be business as usual with at least forty hours a week.
In 2015, money in the form of cash, plastic or credit, was still king, and work ensured its distribution. A world without work, where the people could enjoy the benefits of Cornucopia, had yet to be invented. As to the billions of poor knocking at the doors of rich nations, that was yet another problem.
The idea that all of humanity would benefit from a robotic revolution was very debatable. In the same way if human life could be extended to one or one hundred and fifty years, the advantages would be be reserved for the rich and powerful. Workers in developed economies would ineluctably suffer as the labour pool grew and cost of production fell. The unemployed and unemployable would be assisted, but would they have access to Cornucopia?
Beyond the frontiers of affluent nations, the revolution would result in the fall of productive employment and the world would sink into dystopian chaos, with the unemployed and their families setting out on a perilous journey, in a desperate bid to reach Cornucopia, only to be met by trenches, moats and steel barriers.
Francis taught three waves of revolution had taken place in modern history: first was the Industrial Revolution that commenced in the Middle of the 18th century, with innovations like the steam engine and the spinning jenny; with the second, in the latter part of the 19th century, came mass industrialisation; followed by the third wave, the development of information technology in the second half of the 20th century.
With the start of the third millennium the fourth revolution was at hand: the age of robotics, not the humanoid form as imagined by early science fiction writers, but one that replaced human intelligence and in a multitude of physical forms; on land, sea and air; in homes, offices and factories; in schools, universities and hospitals, in agriculture, animal husbandry and the food supply chain, all at the service of humanity … that is to say those fortunate enough to live in the developed or the nascent Cornucopian world.
Francis asked his students whether privileged nations would ring-fence themselves, building physical barriers, in the same way as European nations were building fences and setting up frontiers to keep out the tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of teeming foreign shores1. Abandoning them to their dysfunctional universe where wild ideologies converged in a Mad Max like mosaic of societies, which resembled those of the Middle Ages in the dark days that followed the Pest.
Science fiction writers had not been wrong when they imagined humanity having to find another role; being a mindless consumer was never on the books, nor that of a Renaissance courtier: drinking, dancing and fornicating as warring princes plotted.
But what? In the age of discovery men had left home in search of riches and new worlds to conquer, but when they were rich and had all they wanted that urge faded. In 2015, few wanted to fight the savages at their gates; it was a task for sophisticated machines beyond a desolate no-mans-land.
Talk of productivity, the distribution of incomes and technology’s impact on the labour share was patent nonsense in such a society, Francis explained, as for bargaining power the idea was absurd, how could you bargain with machines?
The great error of Keynes was he had imagined lifeless machines, controlled and operated by men. How could he have imagined machines possessing their own brains, which once they could think would condemn human labour to history.
The over-simplification of how machines thought: a simple binary process, was akin to reducing human brains to simply cells or electrical impulses. Francis remembered visiting a company in Finland with his friend Kalevi Kyyrönen, where a tree harvesting machine had been invented that walked on six legs rather than four wheels. Their design was initially based on the manner in which insects walked. But their inventors were stymied by a complex algorithm involving an insoluble series of calculations. Finally they discovered to their surprise a basic logic device solved the problem, in effect nature had provided the answer, modelling the way insects walked, a simple ready made solution for their marvellous machines.
Beyond this example of nature’s way, technology had given way to a cognitive learning process which reasoned in the same way as did the human brain.
1. paraphrasing the sonnet written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 The New Colossus
Cornucopia Page 86
