More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle formulated one of history’s most remarkable thought experiments. What, he asked, would happen if tools could obey commands, even anticipate them? What would happen if they could carry out their work entirely on their own?
Today, what is striking is not Aristotle’s technical imagination but his political imagination. He was more interested in the social consequences of self-operating machines than in their feasibility. Artificial intelligence forces us to confront this issue anew: What becomes of a society whose economy, purpose and welfare state are built on wage labor if wage labor loses that foundational role?
Perhaps the true AI revolution will begin in our conception of what it means to be human, not inside Silicon Valley’s data centers. What’s better: more people or less work for humans? Few contradictions capture our historical moment more precisely.
Never before has a society simultaneously spent so much money attempting to compensate for labor shortages while investing so much in technologies designed to eliminate labor altogether. If current fertility rates continue and net migration falls to zero, United Nations projections suggest that many Western populations will shrink by about 30% by the end of this century. In countries such as Italy, the decline approaches 40%-50%.
Governments have responded with generous family subsidies and large-scale immigration programs but have seen limited economic success. Research suggests that immigration’s fiscal contribution depends heavily on education, employment, age at arrival and migration motive. Highly skilled migrants, the minority, tend to generate net economic gains, whereas low-skilled immigration, the majority, can impose a net fiscal drag on advanced welfare states.
In Britain, falling fertility, population aging and migration have become inseparable topics. Parliamentary debates frequently frame birth rates as a long-term growth problem. At the same time, the government seeks to reduce reliance on migrant labor by expanding domestic training programs.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
