by Jules Older
Picture a world where there's no need for human work.
No. That's a fantasy, nothing more.
Let’s see about that. And let’s start with doctors.
Good. We will always, always need doctors. GPs, brain surgeons, all kinds of—
Let’s find out. In this world, this new world, you fall down and hit your head. You immediately go to—
No, too easy. You've fallen so hard, you've passed out. You're lying on the sidewalk.
Fair enough. The monitor on your iPhone 23 instantly recognizes that you've fallen and you can't get up. Ninety seconds later, it alerts the—
The ambulance! The ambulance team! Driver, medic, nurse.
No, it alerts its built-in MedCheck. Which quickly determines that you've suffered a concussion and are bleeding around your brain. You're going to need surgery and right away.
Ah ha! The ambulance team is on its way.
Actually, the much safer self-driving ambulance is on its way. When it arrives, the HelpBot lifts you onto a gurney which the auto-winch raises into the ambulance, where—
Where a human medic—
Where a late-model MedFix determines that this is beyond its powers to fix. It signals the auto-driver to turn on the siren and find the fastest route to the hospital. It also alerts the hospital’s E-Teem that you'll be there in 14 minutes and will require immediate surgery …
Performed by a brain surgeon!
Performed by a RoboSurg. Which swiftly establishes that you have a subdural hematoma, positions itself on your skull, shaves your hair, sanitizes your head, and precisely drills four small holes from which it swiftly extracts the blood. The procedure is so fast and so precise that you don't require the AnsFlo to administer anesthesia.
Fine, fine. Let’s go to something less physical. You're a neurotic mess. You need a therapist. A human therapist because, of course, you know that a so-called therapy bot does not and never will experience real human emotions.
Yes, you know that. And you'll never trust an AI bot that runs on zeros and ones.
Exactly!
You won't trust a bot. But you're old.
No, I'm not!
Relatively old. The future generation was raised on bots. They were taught by bots. Entertained by bots. Informed by bots. The know that bots are smarter than humans. Of course, they trust their Expander more than a mere psychologist.
OK, we’re going back to basics. In this new world of yours, who’s gonna run the farm? You think the cows are gonna milk themselves?
I'm afraid you're behind the times. On AI-equipped dairy farms, cows are already milking themselves. Today.
Bull!
Well, yes, they're milked by machines. But there's no human involvement. Instead of getting up at the crack of dawn, the farmer is asleep in bed.
Bull!
No, cow. On these farms, the cows wear AI-equipped collars. When their udders get full, they amble over to the milking shed — the AI milking shed — stand in a milking stanchion, and the AI milking machine hooks itself to the cow’s teats and starts pumping. No human involvement. And that's happening now, not in the jobless future.
Yiiii. What about writers? A bot can't write a novel.
Again, behind the times. A woman in South Africa programmed an AI bot to write romance novels. It wrote and published 200 of them … in a year.
OK, fine. But there's one job that will never be human-free.
What's that?
Programming AI to do all this stuff.
Uh, no. Artificial Intelligence is developing so fast and becoming so smart that that bots will very soon be the main creators of other bots.
OK, last thing. If this work-free future of yours is coming, what can we do about it?
Good question. And to be clear, it’s not work-free — it’s work-that-requires humans-to perform-it free. And yes, there is stuff we can do. But, let’s start with what we shouldn't do.
Go on.
We should stop automatically denigrating all things AI, stop wishful-thinking it will go away, stop denouncing it as the devil’s pitchfork. Then, we should start thinking about, talking about, planning and designing a different kind of world.
When should we start?
Now. Now is the time to picture a world where humans will thrive without driving ambulances, without becoming shrinks, without milking cows — without going to work.
Jules Older has done or had done to him nearly everything he's written about here. He took the fall, had the bleed, underwent the skull drilling. He's a clinical psychologist and medical educator. He's even milked a few cows. And, he's a writer, though not of romance novels. You can find his latest kids’ book on the Olders’ Amazon bookshelf.
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