The Green Lamp
I am writing this short article in response to the issue raised by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus with regard to what will happen once the consciousness-lacking automated machines take over the jobs that people are currently holding (security guards, taxi drivers, waiters, etc.).
The answer to this question stems from an old Russian story called The Green Lamp, written by Alexander Grin.
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The story follows two well-dressed rich men walking through 1920s London. After these two had a nice meal at an expensive restaurant, they get out on the street and they notice a badly dressed 25 year old beggar on the brink of starvation. At that moment, one of the ‘noblemen’, Stilton, has a brilliant idea of how to make use of this beggar. He also mentions that the best prank one can pull is to make a human-toy out of someone.
Stilton sits near the beggar and inquires his name and asks about how he ended up on the streets. The beggar’s name was John Eve and he came to London in search of employment and opportunity. Even so, in London the competition was fierce and in time, without income, he was sleeping in the park and on the streets.
Stilton, on the other hand, saw much in his 40 years. He knew exactly how much one can buy with just money. He owned a fortune of about 20 million pounds at that time. So, Stilton makes an offer to John Eve:
“I am ready to give you 10 pounds, on the condition that tomorrow first thing, you get a room somewhere in the city centre, on the second floor with a window facing the street. Every evening, at 5 PM, you have to lit up a lamp with green shading on that very same window facing the street and keep it lit until 12 AM. During this time, while the lamp is lit, you will be asked to not leave the house and you will not be allowed to see or speak to anyone. In actuality, the job isn’t hard and if you agree to these simple terms, I will send you another 10 pounds each month you keep on doing this.”
The beggar was surprised and asked for how long would he be able to benefit from this deal. Stilton said that the duration is unknown, but it could even be for the rest of his life. The last question the beggar gave was: “Why is this green illumination needed?”, to which Mr Stilton replied: “A secret! A big secret!”
The beggar thought that Stilton was out of his mind and considered himself extremely fortunate to have accepted this bargain. After two months have passed, Stilton was walking with the very same friend on the street. At one point, Stilton says:
S: “See Reymer, whenever you become bored, come here and smile. Behind that window is a fool. A fool bought cheap and for a long time. He will die of boredom or go insane, but he will keep waiting … for something to happen, not knowing what exactly.”
R: “You, my friend, are a bit of a fool yourself. What is so funny about this prank?”
S: “The toy … the human-toy, is the sweetest delight!”
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Back to Homo Deus. In today’s world, Stilton stands for capitalists and big profit-driven corporations, that are ready and willing to pay its employees for them to oftentimes work overtime, on weekends, long hours and so on. Think of the very same jobs described in the book of Harari, waiters, taxi drivers, truck drivers. These are jobs that make human-toys as it is somewhat wasteful to make someone income-bound to a mechanical job that requires little to no use of intelligence and knowledge. By mechanical job, I mean — a manual or non-manual mechanical work that can easily be automatised. In terms of resources, this is a waste of brain /computing capacity.
This doesn’t mean that the mechanical jobs are unimportant. It is important to have people doing these tasks, but as time passes, replacing the humans that do mechanical work with actual machines will be cheap and convenient. It will increase efficiency and at the same time free people from what could be perceived as modern slavery. People with free time on their hands, will be able to educate themselves further, to find jobs that require human non-mechanical effort, jobs that require creativity and intuition. Two heads are better than one. Maybe the next 3–4 Elon Musks are doing mindless jobs now because they are stuck in the income-need paradigm.
Of course, not all people will be able to get training and education good enough to allow them access to new and better non-mechanical jobs. This in my view, is the part of the problem that need more attention. So, with this in mind, I will reformulate the question at the end of Harari’s book:
From: “How to deal with future mass unemployment caused by automation?”
To: “How to ensure that the transition of people from mechanical jobs to non-mechanical jobs takes place with maximum efficiency and minimum victims?”
In other words, how do we ensure that ‘human-toys’ cease to exist. When the industrial revolution took place, labour had to shift from agriculture to industry. The steam engine started to replace the mechanical human labour even then, and the change expected to take place now (automation and AI revolution) is just a natural continuation of that process.
In economic terms, labour force is not very mobile. It takes years for the workers to learn new skills and go through a transformation similar to the transition from Agriculture to Industry. More so, the transition from manual agricultural labour to manual industrial labour was not as big a leap as is expected during the current — automation and AI — revolution. The transition now is from manual and non-manual mechanical work that can easily be automatised to non-manual work that is hard if not impossible to automatise in the near future.
In order to achieve this faster, we need: (1) a clear roadmap of what jobs will survive the next revolution, (2) high quality and affordable education, and (3) high quality and affordable at-job trainings.
With regard to (1), Harari offers a list of jobs that will survive the revolution in the end chapter of Homo Deus. Most relevant to mention here are the jobs of algorithm builders and researchers. With regard to (2), in most western European countries education is already of high quality and free or quite affordable. If not affordable, there are credit mechanisms in place for students and unlike the US student credit system, the German, Dutch & French systems are perfectly functional. With regard to (3), at-job trainings there is still much work to be done, but employers are investing more resources into this at the current time. More so, there are many relatively affordable options for online self-learning and self-training. If this practices persist and grow, these will pave the way to a smooth and effective new economic transition and labour market transformation.
A severe limitation to this 3-step plan, is the fact that these decisions need to be coordinated by current Governments. As Harari very well stated, Governments are outdated and inefficient mechanisms for processing data and generating solutions. Unless very progressive Governments take lead (i.e. Estonia, the Netherlands), there will be need of different instruments to bring about the mass education and training reform. One possible option for avoiding Government, is decentralisation and blockchain technology. Since this allows for mass online crowdfunding for big causes and projects, it could be a possible solution for sponsoring the skill-transformation and labour transition. As an instrument of crowdfunding, in 2017 alone, blockchain based investments amounted to $ 5.6 billion. Some of these projects were humanitarian in nature, some relate to education and some are even related to singularity:
Lastly, even if it will be difficult to save the current generation of people employed in the old jobs, we need to at least ensure that their children, the next generation, will not be following in their footsteps. The world needs these homo sapiens to become the next thinkers, the next scientists, the next problem solvers, the next book writers, the next virtual world designers, the next algorithm-generators…
