SYNOPSIS
THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONTAGION: Can Democracy Withstand the Imminent Transformation of Work, Wealth and Social Order? examines how AI/Robotics is overwhelming the fundamental institutions of Western society. But are we prepared for the social impact of the vast changes soon to be upon us?
• Half the world’s workers could be replaced by machines within the next 30 years. The McKinsey Global Institute and Oxford University researchers predict massive job loss with 47% to 50% of US jobs eliminated by 2030 and up to 800 million more jobs destroyed worldwide. • Nor will the AI/robotics transformation produce large numbers of replacement jobs. The AI/robotics systems are already being designed to do those.
No area of work is sacrosanct. Work opportunities are being eliminated from the most “intellectual” activities down to the basic areas of services and labor, including a range of professional occupations heretofore thought of as distinctly human: in middle management, finance, banking, insurance, medicine, high-tech, transportation, law and even the arts.
Worse, it is playing out in the context of a set of critical issues.
• Birth rates are plummeting below replacement levels in economically developed nations. People are living to ages well beyond historical averages. • At least fifty percent of Americans have little or nothing saved for retirement. • Poor and uneducated migrants are coming into Western nations at a time when the agricultural, construction and home care jobs migrants have traditionally filled are being increasingly replaced by robotic workers. • An already bankrupt US government is projected to experience annual deficits above $1 trillion for at least the next ten years. The US national debt is officially admitted to be $21 trillion, but is actually closer to $65 trillion dollars according to a former US Comptroller General.
As AI/robotics eliminates jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels— underfunded or non-existent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction—will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources. All this will take place in an environment of increased AI-facilitated surveillance by governments, aggressive militarization using AI systems and autonomous weapons, and the degradation of the world’s economic and political order.
The final five chapters of CONTAGION offer possible solutions.
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$29.95 2019 352 pp.
Ebook $21.00 ISBN: 978-0-9998747-8-3
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
PART I:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A SYSTEM CHANGE LIKE NONE OTHER
Chapter One: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Chapter Two: Change: Fast, Sweeping and Inexorable
Chapter Three: Experts’ Predictions of Human Job Losses
Chapter Four: Like Us—Only Better?
PART II
THE AI/ROBOTICS CONTAGION IS RIPPING APART GLOBAL ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS Chapter Five: AI Job Loss Is NOT a Cycle of “Creative Destruction” and Economic Rebirth
Chapter Six: AI/Robotics and the “Great Decoupling” of Economic Productivity and Job Creation
Chapter Seven: AI/Robotics and Our Fragmenting Social Order
Chapter Eight: Our Globalist “Leaders” Have Betrayed the American Worker
Chapter Nine: The Social Costs of Disconnecting Productivity from the Needs of Labor
Chapter Ten: What Will Our Unemployed Children Do?
Chapter Eleven: “Winners” and “Losers” in the Evolving Job Market
Chapter Twelve: What Job Skills Are Likely to Provide the Greatest Advantages?
Chapter Thirteen: The “Age Curse” as the New “Population Bomb”
Chapter Fourteen: AI/Robotics and the Special Case of China
Chapter Fifteen: Six Case Studies
Chapter Sixteen: If No One Is Working Who Will Buy the Goods and Services?
PART III:
WHAT IS AI AND WHAT IS IT DOING TO US?
Chapter Seventeen: Artifical Intelligence Systems-The Basics
Chapter Eighteen: Do AI Systems Pose a Threat to Human Existence?
Chapter Nineteen: How Would Advanced AI/Robotics Systems View Humans?
Chapter Twenty: The Mutating Effects of AI Technology
PART IV
THE EXISTING ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL “ECOSYSTEM”
Chapter Twenty-One: The US Is Bankrupt
Chapter Twenty-Two: “Collect It All, Know It All, Exploit It All”
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Socially Destructive Consequences of the AI-Driven Internet
Chapter Twenty-Four: Dismantling the “New Republics” of Google, Amazon and Facebook
PART V:
TOWARD POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS Chapter Twenty-Five: Innovative Revenue and Expenditure Strategies Are Critical for Effective Solutions Chapter Twenty-Six: “Priming the Pump”: Strategies for Stability in an AI/Robotics-Driven Economy Chapter Twenty-Seven: Universal Basic Income (UBI): Solution or Catastrophe? Chapter Twenty-Eight: Government Jobs and Private Sector Job Subsidies Are More Vital than Generally Understood
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Writing Is On the Wall
Index About the Authors
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THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONTAGION Can Democracy Withstand the Imminent Transformation of Work, Wealth and the Social Order?
By David Barnhizer and Daniel Barnhizer
ISBN: 978-0-9998747-7-6
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Artificial Intelligence: Have we opened a Pandora's Box?
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David Barnhizer is a Professor of Law Emeritus at
Cleveland State University. He was a Senior
Research Fellow at the University of London's
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and Visiting
Professor at the Westminster University’s School of
Law. He worked in the International Program of the
Natural Resources Defense Council, was Executive
Director of the Year 2000 Committee, and consulted
with the World Resources Institute, IIED, the UNDP,
the President’s Council on Environmental Quality,
the World Bank, the UN/FAO, World Wildlife Fund/US,
and the Mongolian government. He served as a
director of Performance Capital Management,
consultant for British Petroleum’s Sovonics Solar
Systems, Rapporteur for the Foresight Capability
Workshop of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, and worked on projects with various
federal agencies. He holds a Juris Doctor degree,
summa cum laude, from Ohio State and Masters of
Law degree from Harvard. His books include
Strategies for Sustainable Societies, The Blues of a
Revolution, Effective Strategies for Protecting Human
Rights, The Warrior Lawyer, and Hypocrisy & Myth:
The Hidden Order of the Rule of Law.
Daniel Barnhizer is the Bradford Stone
Faculty Scholar at the Michigan State
University School of Law. He graduated
summa cum laude from Miami University and
earned a Juris Doctor degree, with honors,
from Harvard. He works in tax, contract law
and theory, conservation law, comparative
law, and the Rule of Law. He is coauthor of
books in Contracts, Commercial
Transactions, the Rule of Law, and directs
MSU’s Conservation Law Program and its
Institute for Comparative Law &
Jurisprudence at Poland’s University of
Bialystok Faculty of Law. He teaches
regularly in Poland and Lithuania and was a
Lecturer at Jinan University in China. He has
extensive business experience and worked
for the law firms of Hogan & Hartson and
Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. He was
judicial law clerk for the Honorable Richard
L. Nygaard, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd
Circuit, and for the Honorable Robert B.
Krupansky, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th
Circuit.
EXCERPT:
from Chapter 1, Society Under Siege
With the combination of Artificial Intelligence and robotics
(AI/robotics) humans have opened a “Pandora’s Box” and are
incapable of undoing the ills that are being released, with more
coming seemingly by the day. The joining of Artificial Intelligence
and robotic systems that are increasingly capable of acting more
effectively than us in a wide range of work, surveillance, and
information detection and management situations is the primary
driver of a shift that is tearing our fracturing societies further
apart.
Our political leaders have an extremely limited understanding of
what is occurring with Artificial Intelligence and robotics, in terms
of the elimination of massive numbers of jobs, and the potentially
devastating impacts of these developments on the United States,
Western Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Bill Gross, of Janus
Capital, has warned: “No one in 2016 is really addressing the
future as we are likely to experience it.” He explains: “the
current crop of national leaders is hopelessly behind this curve….
Our economy has changed, but voters and their elected
representatives don’t seem to know what’s really wrong.”
Artificial Intelligence applications and robotics are taking over our
culture, altering how we behave and even who we are as
addictions grow and our dependence on AI/robotics systems
expands exponentially. Examples of our dependence are easy to
find. We are often required to pass tests for on-line access to
various websites by answering the question “Are you a robot?”
accompanied by numbers or specially constructed pictures
designed to prove that we are flesh and blood humans to the AI
application controlling the site. In the US we are flooded by
billions of continuous “robocalls” and telephonic and e-mail scams
made to seem as if a human is calling to the point that many do not
answer their landline or discontinue service entirely.
Such things seem trivial or irritating but, when we think a bit more
deeply about what they portend, it demonstrates the penetration
of AI/robotics into much of what we do, our heightened
dependence on such systems, and the fact that it is becoming
increasingly difficult to differentiate human from AI. Penetration,
dependence and the difficulty of differentiation are developing
rapidly. Recent reports on video and virtual reality technology
indicate they are reaching a stage at which false images can be
created that are impossible to distinguish from reality. Franklin
Foer writes in The Atlantic that: “We’ll shortly live in a world where
our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far
from the collapse of reality.” Such a collapse of “true reality” is
only possible by the powers created by AI technology.
We are on the verge of quantum leaps in AI/robotics capabilities,
including surveillance, military and weapons technologies,
autonomous self-driving vehicles, massive job elimination, data
management and privacy invasion, medical breakthroughs and
even human augmentation through such things as implants, “add-
ons” and the merging of people with AI and robotics...
REVIEWS
“We see in the rush to develop AI the arrogance of the human
species. Often buried by the exuberance over what AI might do is
the massive dislocation it can cause. David and Daniel Barnhizer
masterfully lead us through the societal challenges AI poses and
offer possible solutions that will enable us to survive the AI
contagion.”
—KENNETH A. GRADY
Member, Advisory Boards, Elevate Services, Inc.,
MDR Lab, and LARI Ltd.
"A sobering look at the far-reaching impact that artificial
intelligence may have on the economy, the workforce, democracy
and all of humanity. The Artificial Intelligence Contagion is a
bellwether for anyone seeking to comprehend the global
disruption coming our way."
—DAVID COOPER, President and Technologist , Massive Designs
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