Oftentimes I like to wonder about the future. Not my personal future, but the broader future of humanity in general. Where are we going, really? Surely I can't be the only one who wonders about this. After all, we have science fiction writers. We even have a few people like Elon Musk actively seeking to drag the future into the present (or is it the other way around?).
This is partly why I want to go back to school to study Artificial Intelligence. If we can teach computers to think and solve problems in a more human manner - that is, if we can teach computers to be creative (or even fake it well enough), this could open up whole new realms for humanity. Think what could be accomplished if we had even fifty machines working around the clock, trying to solve issues that most wouldn't bother themselves with.
/*The other reason is, I really like working with algorithms and the abstract problem solving portion of computer programming, yet I'm not what I would consider a "techy" person. I honestly couldn't care less about the specs of the latest gadget out on the market. So a position in something like AI research might be better suited to me than one where I'm writing smartphone apps.*/
Even without that, I suspect current AI and robotics, as well as other technology such as 3D printing, is quickly approaching a sort of "critical mass" that will fundamentally transform the way we live. The reason being, pretty soon we may be able to completely replace large amounts of laborers, in industries such as manufacturing, with machines. While we have machines running in factories now, we still need people to run and maintain many of them now - whereas, if the machines can maintain and run themselves, suddenly those jobs become superfluous. The limiting factor at the moment is largely cost, but I think as technology progresses we might just find cheaper ways to produce these things.
While this is all well and good, there's a sneaky elephant in the room - with the human population expanding, and the labor pool drying up, are we doomed to face massive unemployment? I would put my money on it. Fortunately for the US, we've already outsourced a large portion of the vulnerable jobs to countries like China. This will be a problem for poor laborers in 3rd world sweatshops more so than for anyone else - which is unfortunate considering how little they have. Hopefully the transition will be gradual enough that the blow will be softened a bit.
Either way, at some point we will likely have to question (dangerously, I might add), a fundamental concept that has driven economics since the dawn of humanity - the idea that people need to work to support themselves. This idea arose organically out of the simple facts of life - you need food to survive, and someone has to produce it. For the most part this has held true, save for a few exceptions: there are people with so much that they don't need to work, and management really only takes credit for work the people under them do. However, pretty soon we may reach a point where humanity can be sustained entirely by machine labor. What would be the point of insisting people find nonexistent jobs to pay for basic essentials that we could provide to everyone anyway?
As good of a system capitalism is (from a functional standpoint), I don't think its current iteration is equipped to deal with that kind of shock to its system. Nor am I advocating for any strain of Marxism. That has always faced the issue of centralizing power into the hands of government. For every one person who would use that power for good, there are literally thousands who would stop at nothing to use it for themselves. Power doesn't merely corrupt; it draws the corrupt like moths to a flame.
What I hope comes out of this sort of transformation is a far more altruistic system - one where people pursue their interests in a way that benefits the larger whole. We might end up seeing a society not unlike that from Roddenberry's Star Trek. But that kind of change would not be easy, and it would have to come from lots of individual actions to really work properly. Charity by force is theft, after all.
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