John McCone : Philosophy For The Future

Philosophy For The Future

Automation

How Basic Income Promotes Environmental Sustainability

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Basic Income, Wages, Self-Provision and Full Employment

 

MAXSHOT-PL/Shutterstock.com

First, a recap on what I’ve discussed in a previous article, on how basic income can facilitate self-sufficiency thereby raising wages and promoting full employment, as this is crucially relevant to the positive environmental influence of basic income.

The ability of Basic Income to facilitate self-provision is much neglected in discourse on this subject.

At the most fundamental level, humans are rearrangers – reconfigurers. We cannot magically make things of value appear from nothing – out of a vacuum, so to speak – but we can rearrange things of low value and little use into assemblies of high value and greater use.

Every time the demand for a given object exceeds its supply, that object acquires a price. Human labour always has a price as the supply of it will tend to shrink to maintain its price – since people will not work for nothing. When it comes to nature, however, some naturally occurring, yet scarce, things such as mineral resources, fertile farmland and forests containing high quality timber, have a price, while other plentiful things, such as air, for which supply exceeds demand, are free.

In principle, penniless people can create value with their labour from nothing through reconfiguring plentiful resources that can be obtained for free into things of value. In practice, some natural resources yield more value per unit of human effort, put into reconfiguring them, than others. A given quantity of effort applied to fertile soil will produce more food than the same effort applied to sterile soil. A given quantity of effort put into mining a mineral seam close to the surface will yield more ore than the same effort applied to a mineral seam located deeper down. A given quantity of effort applied to a rich fishing ground will yield more fish than the same time and effort spent fishing poorer waters.

In general, since people tend to want to use their time as productively as possible, they will tend to prefer to access raw resources which yield a lot of value for given amount of effort applied compared to resources that yield a less value for the same effort. However, resources which can be reconfigured into things of high value, when a given quantity of labour is applied to them, are usually simultaneously somewhat scarce and also in high demand.

This means that favourable inputs for labour – that can be reconfigured into something of high value with a modest degree of effort – have a price associated with them in addition to the finished product.

Labour is therefore best described as a value, or capital, amplifier which, through some process of rearrangement, multiplies the value of inputs.

However, a given amount of effort spent on worthless plentiful inputs, generally leads to outputs of minimal value  – for if such inputs delivered more value, many people would want them and they would acquire a price…

…and since people need to constantly consume a given rate of value – in the form of nutrition and maintenance of shelter – to survive, it is entirely possible that the rate at which someone can produce value from plentiful resources in low demand may be less than the rate at which they must consume value to survive: in which case, people that lacks access to input capital would die.

In his book, Progress And Poverty, Henry George made the point that in a state of nature the condition of unemployment would be unthinkable as productive activities would always be available for people to occupy their time with, whether hunting, fishing, gathering berries, crafting shelter, tools, etc., etc. He then asks: “What is different to the lot of primitive man, who can always find productive activities with which to employ his labour, and a modern unemployed man who can find nothing useful to do?”

 

Henry George author of Progress and Poverty

Henry George writes:

 

“…what, in the conditions of freedom, will be the terms at which one man can hire others to work for him? Evidently, they will be fixed by what the men could make if labouring for themselves [on free land]. The principle which will prevent him from having to give anything above this, except what is necessary to induce the change, will also prevent them from taking anything less. Did they demand more, the competition from others would prevent them from getting employment. Did he offer less, none would accept the terms, as they could obtain greater results by working for themselves.”

 

 

 

 

His concluded that productive labour requires access to the resources and wealth of nature. In early times, this resource was once open and available to all; today, the institution of land ownership denies the penniless unemployed pauper access to the basic resources he requires to employ his time productively.

The solution: redistribute all land rents out as a per capita income. Then everyone will have equal access to the wealth associated with the raw materials of nature with which to occupy their time productively – essentially giving rise to conditions of full employment.

 

The most sensible way to think about employment (at least in the context of it being a social good) is having access to the ability to use your time productively. This could be access to paying customers who demand your time OR it can be access to capital that you can expend effort into rearranging into configurations of higher value.

 

The size of the Basic Income will likely be fairly modest. The magic happens when this modest incomes combines with low interest loans (and as explained later, basic income has the effect of reducing interest rates). £5,000 a year can service a £250,000 loan at 2% interest. So quite a modest income – when combined with a low interest loan – could facilitate access to a great deal of capital.

The point of basic income is not to enable people to live well without working, rather, it is to enable people to live well without selling their work in the labour market.

 

And by combining basic income with low interest self-sufficiency loans, people could access sufficient capital to spend money today to save money tomorrow.

 

Productivity is about applying your labour to produce something of value for someone. Whether that someone is yourself, or someone else, is irrelevant to the amount of wealth that a given effort gives rise to.

And the great advantage of producing wealth for yourself, is you are guaranteed not to get fired or lose your customers.

The simplest thing we need is shelter, after that comes food. So, in this respect, a self-sufficiency loan would mainly be used for homesteading. Procuring the tools and raw materials which, once mixed with hard work, (in an activity such as house construction) will produce a shelter whose value is a multiple of the value of the inputs. Ditto with food production. In this case, a self-sufficiency loan would be used to procure materials and tools that enhance the productivity of the land (such as fertilizers, greenhouses, etc.,) while reducing the labour required to maintain it (gardening tools, tractors, other farm equipment etc.,) other examples of using labour and time, to provide a service that saves money, would be cycling rather than driving. It’s slower and involves more effort, but you expend less money for the same end result (getting from A to B).

All-in-all by industriously applying one’s labour to raw materials, purchased with a self-sufficiency loans, (whose yearly repayments are serviced with basic income ) to construct and maintain your own house and set up your own homestead. to produce all the high quality food you need, it should be possible, with the application of labour, to amplify the value one’s basic income many-fold. Basic Income should not be compared with a wage as at the end of the week, when the wage earner receives their salary, 40 hours of their time has been depleted. In the case of the basic income recipient, they still have 40 hours of their time left to amplify the value of their stock of capital with their labour. In that sense, while the money paid to a basic income recipient might be £5,000/year, the value they generate, through amplifying the value of the capital they purchase with their labour, (house construction, growing food, brewing beer etc.,) could easily be equivalent to a time-depleting salary of £20,000/year or more.

 

Iakov Filimonov/Shutterstock.com

Furthermore, self-sufficiency will also have the effect of propping up wages. For a homesteader, used to using his time productively to improve his life, every hour working for someone else is one less hour available to provide value for himself. Thus, he will only accept a wage that can purchase goods and services whose aggregate value is higher than the same value he could have generated working to supply his own needs.

The net effect of basic income will, therefore, be to stabilize wages at the level of the self-sufficient lifestyle. When wages rise above this threshold, due to scarcity of labour, homesteaders will start emerging from their homestead to work in the labour market. When wages fall below this level, homesteaders will return to their homestead and the supply of labour will go down (which in turn will maintain its price and hold up wages).

Furthermore, self-sufficient economic activities are key to maintaining a flexible, yet humane, labour market. One of the root anxieties surrounding “precarious” labour, is the concern that, if there are suddenly no jobs available, you have no outlet to productively apply your activities and efforts that will bring benefit to yourself. Yet an industrious self-sufficient population will have no fear of a flexible labour market. If a gig opens up where the money’s good, they can earn some extra cash; if there aren’t any jobs on offer that pay well, they can focus on the homestead instead. This situation works well for both employee and employer.

Furthermore, industrious self-sufficiency also eliminates the concern of many employers, that if someone has not worked for a long time, they get “out of the habit” of working. A self-sufficient population will retain the habit of working effectively, concentrating on the task at hand, and carefully planning their time and resources – whether or not they are working for someone else. As such, the activity of self-sufficiency will simultaneously create effective full employment while at the same time ensuring a guaranteed stock of competent labour for any business that needs it which is willing to pay decent wages that induce people to leave their homesteads.

Basic income and low interest loans promote the activity of self-provision, this will simultaneously promote full employment, raise wages and support a flexible labour market which benefits both employee and employer.

 

How Self-Sufficiency Promotes Environmental Sustainability

 

Basic Income facilitates the activity of self-provision, enabling people to withdraw their labour from the workforce. This inherently strongly motivates people to conserve the limited capital they acquire.

The goal of someone who provides for themselves will be to maximally inflate the value of any capital they import with their labour. If you only apply your efforts to provide for yourself, then you can think of whatever valuable material you can purchase with a loan (for which the interest payment is your basic income) as the only valuable material you have to work with. If too much of your capital breaks, you’re screwed. So self-providers will focus on using and reusing the same capital again and again and again and – in general – minimizing capital inputs. If giving plants a little tender loving care reduces the amount of pesticide or fertilizer you need, then, since pesticide and fertilizer cost money (which is irreplaceable for a homesteader who has taken out a large self-provision loan) that could be used for other things, self-providers will likely finds ways to minimize these inputs.

Capital depreciation is the enemy of all self-providers, whose stock of input capital is limited. Hence, self-providers have a strong incentive to work hard to preserve capital value, including natural capital, like soil quality, and are likely to practice agricultural techniques which preserve it.

Furthermore, in addition to self-providers producing as much value with their own labour as possible, with the minimum amount of capital, self-providers also consume value at the point at which they create it. If we think of a supply chain from:

raw material -> component -> more advanced component -> product

Aun Photographer/Shutterstock.com

In our current economy, many of the different factories which assemble input components into more advanced components, higher up the supply chain, are thousands of miles away from each other. So, for many products, between every step of their assembly journey there is often a lot of transport. And the final product can also be thousands of miles away from the customer. Also, the assembly process is usually very energy intensive these days.

Self-providers, will tend to purchase cheaper component lower down the supply chain, or simply second hand products in their local area, and then either apply their labour to move them up the supply chain, or perhaps repair products that are on sale for cheap that would otherwise be thrown away. By importing products lower down the supply chain and moving them up the assembly process with their own labour, rather than an energy intensive factory process, self-providers can dramatically reduce the energy input required to create a final product and deliver it to the customer.

The closer the point of value production is to the point of value consumption, the less energy is needed in transportation.

By producing value in the same location where they consume it, self-providers, who consume their own value save a huge amount on transport.

We can also think of the daily commute to work as a geographic separation between the point of value production from the point of value consumption, or even a trip to the shops – and one that contributes a great deal to CO2 emissions. Self-providers won’t commute: their day of work will consist of walking out the back door into their garden and tending some plants – or doing repairs on the house and the like.

In almost every respect, self-provision gears people towards capital conservation – including natural capital, along with the minimization of resource dissipation. This is inherently environmentally friendly and conducive to sustainable living.

Initially it is likely that less than 20% of people will be self-providers, but, as automation progresses, participation in the commercial economy will likely reduce to an ever shrinking pool of elite super-organizers of capital, who may compose less than 5% of the population with perhaps, 95% of the population living as self-providers who each manage their own heavily automated micro-production systems for food and house repair.

By facilitating self-provision rather than bullshit city jobs and global supply chains, Basic Income will result in a major reduction in CO2 emissions – especially as automation progresses.

 

How Low Interest Promotes a Long Term Outlook

 

In addition to facilitating a high quality self-provision lifestyle on a modest basic income, low interest loans can significantly reduce the production of pollution in other ways as well.

And basic income, combined with self-provision, will tend to create a low-interest environment.

As an initial simplification, the stock of consumer products is a reasonable approximation to people’s quality of life, while the rate of product manufacturing is a reasonable approximation to the rate of pollution.

This would suggest that the best way to optimize the ratio of public well-being to the production of pollution is to maximize the lifetime and energy efficiency of each product, and minimize the rate of material consumption required to maintain them.

All else being equal, products that don’t break, provide the same service to consumers for less energy, and require little in the way of maintenance and the replacement of parts are more desirable than products which don’t possess these characteristics.

The only problem is: designing products to never break, consume very little energy and last forever is really hard…and expensive!

For this reason, lower quality products that break quickly and consume more energy tend to be cheaper than high quality products which are more efficient and last longer.

So which product should you buy? The cheap product that is going to break and consumes more energy…or the way more expensive product that won’t break, requires less fuel and will last forever.

The answer is…it depends on the interest rate!

Let’s define the “running costs” of a particular product/item of capital as:

Running costs = Fuel Costs + Maintenance Costs + Replacement Costs + Breakdown Costs

(Where breakdown costs might be the cost of a piece of hardware that is essential to a production line and will stop the entire production line until it is fixed or replaced, or perhaps the costs of hiring a taxi rather than driving because the car broke down etc.,)

If

Running Costs > ( Purchase Cost Premium ) * (Interest Rate)

Then you should buy the more expensive product with the lower running costs.

If

Running Costs < ( Purchase Cost Premium ) * (Interest Rate)

You should buy the cheaper product with the higher running costs.

As a general rule, products with higher running costs, which need to be maintained and replaced regularly and consume more energy, are more polluting than products with lower running costs that are more energy efficient and require less maintenance and replacement.

Therefore, by encouraging the procurement of less polluting capital, lower interest rates encourage lower levels of long term pollution for a given quality of life.

The inverse of the interest rate is the time horizon for planning to minimize costs. A 10% interest rate is compatible with a 10 year planning horizon. At 10%, owners of money will purchase capital so that the combined purchasing and running costs are minimized over the course of 10 years. At 2% interest, the owners of capital will purchase capital to minimize the combined purchasing and running costs of that capital over 50 years.

The higher the interest rate, the less we care about the future, the lower the interest rate, the more we care about the future.

When central banks set the interest rate, they are telling industries all over the country how important the future is.

If central banks set interest rates at 10%, then they shouldn’t be surprised if, after 10 years time, cities get flooded, agricultural yields crash causing mass famine as a result of runaway soil erosion, natural resources that run energy guzzling equipment run out, causing that equipment to shut down, along with the civilization which depends on it, to collapse.

If central banks set interest rates at 10%, they shouldn’t be surprised if society collapses and everyone dies in 10 years time, because by setting interest rates at 10%, they just told the market it doesn’t matter what happens to society after 10 years!

 

While this view may be a slight simplification it is, broadly speaking, true. With very few (possibly no) exceptions, the deployment of environmentally friendly technologies is most favourable in a low interest rate environment.

Whether we are talking about installing wind turbines, solar panels, home insulation, heat pumps, purchasing a battery powered car to replace your existing petrol powered car practically all of these energy saving measures involve a heavy resource outlay today to save on future resource extraction costs – a strategy that uses more resources today, to save the aggregate amount of resources used in the long term.

This strategy only makes sense in a low interest rate environment.

Low interest rates promote environmentally friendly strategies for providing people with capital, to live high quality lives with minimal long term pollution and resource depletion, across the board.

 

Basic Income Reduces Real Interest Rates

 

When I talk about interest rates, I mean real interest rates which real businesses and private individuals can access to invest in projects that will save them energy and money over the long term. Today, even though central bank interest rates are low, private individuals and businesses can rarely obtain loans at anything like the interest rates advertised by central banks.

Basic Income, however, ensures that real interest rates, which individuals and businesses can access, will be as low as nominal interest rates.

The main thing which causes real interest rates to rise above baseline central bank interest rates is the risk of debt default.

The main thing that cause people to default on their debts is a cessation, or uncontrolled drastic reduction, in their wages/income.

Basic income will provide everyone with a reliable income both:

  • Directly – as it is itself a reliable income
  • Indirectly – through facilitating the activity of self-provision, Basic income will create a vacuum in the workforce that will both, prop up wages and ensure that anyone who wants a job that pays decent money (in order to meet their debt payments) will be able to readily find one as self-provision will ensure there is always demand on the part of employers for those willing to do an honest day’s work, and that such employers will always give them an honest day’s pay in exchange.

When we combine the effect that basic income will have on radically lowering the default rate, with its effect on lowering interest rates, it is clear that Basic Income will serve to drastically increase the sustainability of our society.

Finally, high levels of social capital essential for, long-lived stocks of material capital. There is little point in paying 3 times as much money to build houses, and other infrastructure, to last a thousand years in a community that’s filled with terrorists, arsonists and vandals. However, through reducing poverty and practically eliminating unemployment, basic income will create functional societies that are capable of responsibly maintaining their capital stocks and usher in a future that is both prosperous and environmentally sustainable.

 

John

Attack of The Robocrats!

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MONOPOLY919/Shutterstock.com

Governments, all over the world, increasingly encourage citizens to interact with automated bureaucratic processing systems, rather than human representatives, when filing tax returns, applying for welfare, applying for a passport, etc. Human interaction is becoming an exception reserved for when the computer fails. This trend is not limited to governments. Private companies frequently deploy automated response systems as the first line of defence against engagement, only giving their most tenacious callers access to human beings.

This automation of customer service, and bureaucracy, can reduce queues and processing times, but, as with sex robots,  the total automation of bureaucracy threatens to concentrate power in the hands of a few controllers. The potential for these controllers to abuse such systems is tremendous.

The film Elysium depicts the extensive use of robots in confrontational roles, such as police, or parole officers. Machines don’t have empathy, and have unlimited patience. These traits may be desirable for some roles. A human benefit officer, who’s dealing with difficult applicants, may eventually resort to bending the rules to help them. An automated system can say “no” all day (even all week). Human officials have high salaries that must be covered, so they will feel pressure to process people quickly. They are also afraid, that if a client complains about them, they might lose their job. An automated system (especially running on your PC) has zero hourly running costs and if an applicant, whose housing benefit get cut off by the automated system, commits suicide, there’s no one to blame. Perhaps, in some cases, troublesome applicants should not be prioritised, but, in other cases, they are troublesome precisely because of their desperate situation.

Concerns over who’s responsible for driverless car accidents are just the tip of a much larger iceberg. Who’s responsible when an algorithm blocks your credit card payment? Who’s responsible when an automated welfare system accidentally cuts off your unemployment benefits? Or wrongfully cancels your immigration visa? Or mistakenly cancels someone’s health insurance without informing them? Or fails to pay your salary that week? Or calls in your loan after mistakenly finding you in breach of its terms? Or delists your business, or reduces the ranking of your company, costing you tens of thousands in sales? For those of you who are weird like me and read the full terms and conditions of the various automatic services you subscribe to, the answer is clear: “Company X accepts no responsibility whatsoever for any damage or harm caused by the failure of our software.” This is pretty much ubiquitously across the terms and conditions of all software services.

Furthermore, what about tenants evicted by robo-bailiffs for not paying rent? Or robot police and security guards? If a human bailiff, security guard or police officer inappropriately physically assaults someone, they could lose their job or be sent to prison. But what happens if a RoboCop, bailiff, or security guard does the same? The corporation that made it would be liable, but fining a large corporation is a far smaller deterrent than imprisoning a human worker, thereby destroying his career. Programmers may calculate the legal liability for the harm caused by a particular decision tree is less than the time it saves their clients, or the money it makes them. Security robocrats with these decision trees could do more harm than human employees who bear direct criminal responsibility for their actions. And if the final software comes from a long supply chain, where one company uses a software package supplied by another company, and sells the final program on to a third company, which uses it in a slightly different manner to the supplier’s original specifications, it might be impossible to pinpoint the source of the blame. This could create a moral hazard as, in many cases, bosses might prefer for robocrats, unconcerned with criminal responsibility, to make certain decisions: refusing to pay out insurance, sending out fines to raise money for a municipal government, overestimating tax liability, cutting benefits, overcharging on bills, etc., etc.

People harmed by automated robocratic decisions may be less motivated to pursue them in court. Court cases generally involve evidence, time and legal fees. When another person has consciously wronged or mistreated us, we often feel compelled to seek justice against them despite the cost and inconvenience, but when the decision of something harms us, it no longer seems worth the effort to pursue it. Algorithm designers may take this into account when programming decision-making strategies to maximize their client’s profits.

Robocracy also contributes to the growth of unpaid work which Guy Standing has drawn attention to. Frequent job changes mean more time applying for jobs, reskilling, networking. Beyond that, there’s self-assessed tax returns, work visas (for those who find work abroad) along with registering (and perhaps later deregistering – which is sometimes even harder) with other nations’ tax systems. Today we must also check our own food out at the supermarket and be our own travel agent, booking hotels, planes and organising our itinerary. This is largely because an automated system’s time is free while an employee’s time is expensive. A customer or job applicant’s time may be valuable to them, but it costs nothing to companies and government bureaucracies, so institutions are increasingly dumping work onto customers and applicants at every available opportunity. Once upon a time, if a company or a government asked a customer or a tax-payer to fill out a form, they had to pay a bureaucrat to read that form. Today robocratic algorithms can process it with humans only looking at a small sample of flagged forms or metadata generated by statistically analysing thousands of forms. This creates a moral hazard, for the designers of forms and applications, to make them lengthier, effectively imposing unpaid work on the people who have to fill them.

Beyond that, as AI advances, it will be capable of processing evermore complicated laws. There is a danger that laws may someday get too complex for human lawyers or judges to comprehend. At that point, it will be necessary to fully automate the court system. Past civilizations collapsed under the weight of their own bureaucracy. Today, however, intelligence is so cheap the legal system might sustain itself, even as it gets exponentially more complex. However, if it becomes too complex for humans to handle, the time may come where robot police, bring human beings before robocrat judges and robot juries which send them to fully-automated prisons.

The potential of technology to facilitate the interests of its designer is massive. But what if the designer’s interests clash with other people? From the perspective those at the receiving end, certain technologies may reduce their quality of life and diminish their autonomy. The effects of automating decisions, which may affect and harm people who have never consented to let robots determine their destiny, deserve our intense scrutiny.

 

John

Arms Races At The Speed Of Light

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Flexible Manufacturing and Weapons Technology in The Information Age

 

Arms Races article written by John McCone
leolintang/Shutterstock.com

Dual-use weapons are as old as mankind, you can bale hay with a pitchfork or plunge it into someone’s chest, a base-ball bat can hit a home run or smash open a skull; everything from bicycle chains to chainsaws and, most recently, cars can be used to injure – and even kill – other human beings. People will always have access to the tools of death. Freedom to use a wide range of tools in a variety of activities necessarily enables individuals, with sinister inclinations, to abuse that freedom and kill others. We can only punish them after the fact.

But what if a dual-use tool could enable an average person to kill thousands, perhaps millions, of people in a short space of time? What if the benefits of this technology were so great that countries which banned it would plunge into recession?

 

Does such a technology exist?

 

Yes. It’s called flexible manufacturing and its future implications are as terrifying as they are unavoidable, with clear solutions all but non-existent.

3-D printing – the general term for manufacturing processes that can convert a digital file into any arbitrary 3 dimensional shape – is the poster child for flexible manufacturing. A rudimentary 3D printer costs a few hundred pounds while big brands, like Makerbot, might cost a few thousand. Although off-the-self 3D printers can make arbitrary shapes, the variety of materials they can use is limited. However, commercial 3D printers work with many more materials and can print aircraft and even spacecraft components! Some 3D printers can even build most of the components that are required to replicate and even upgrade themselves.

Skeptics of 3D printing technology point out that it is still often more expensive than other manufacturing techniques and that 3D printed parts are often lower quality compared to other methods…

…but 3D printing is only the most dramatic example of a general, inexorable trend for all types of manufacturing systems to become cheaper, smaller and more flexible. CNC machines can also manufacture a vast array of components of all shapes and sizes through simply downloading a file with the right information in the right format. And the cost of a rudimentary CNC machine is also £200 or so – about the same as a 3D printer.

On a factory level, 3D printers, CNC machines and other automated processes can be integrated into flexible manufacturing systems  that can rapidly switch between producing completely different products simply by inputting new instructions.

The economic case for flexible manufacturing systems, that can rapidly respond to changes in consumer demand without expensive retooling, is compelling, and, as time goes by, these systems will inevitably become ever cheaper, ever smaller, and ever more flexible.

A universal manufacturing system is the logical conclusion of this trend. A set of automated tools and robots in a small space that could manufacture anything – surgical instruments, lawn mowers, aircrafts, guns, cars, robots, computers, mobile phones, bio-weapon laboratories, tables, chairs, cosmetics, androids, cutlery – and arbitrarily switch from making one product to making another in less than a minute.

Once this technology matures, and becomes affordable to everyone, then everyone will have the capability to manufacture sophisticated, lethal military-grade weapons platforms from the comfort of their own homes.

 

Flexible Manufacturing and The International Balance of Power

 

Automation is not just about job loss. It is also enables extremely rapid shifts in the coordinated behaviour of artificial actors and manufactured goods.

 

A side effect being the distinction between the ability to produce weapons and the ability to produce economic goods of all kinds – will disappear.

In general, it takes a year or two to fully mobilize a military for large scale war. Conscripted civilians must be trained as soldiers, factories must reorganize their workforce to build armaments, dedicated armament factories must be built. And only after manufacturing state of the art weaponry, can you properly train soldiers how to use it.

Once every country on Earth has universal (or highly flexible) manufacturing systems, the switch to a war footing will take minutes. Automated weapons platforms will emerge from factories with optimized battle-software that can overcome and destroy an enemy with maximum efficiency – no training, or generals, required. Any country with universal manufacturing capability and up to date design and battle software – even ones without any military at all – will rapidly be able to create the most formidable military on Earth.

Diplomatic relations between countries depend, among other things, on the implicit knowledge of how total war would pan out – especially for the loser. A nation that anticipates defeat will likely back down as disputes with stronger nations escalate. However, if both nations mistakenly believe they could easily defeat the other, the escalation towards total war is far more likely. World War 1 is what happens when combatants grossly underestimated the cost and duration of conflict and, consequently, make little diplomatic effort to avoid it.

 

Furthermore:

Increasingly flexible manufacturing systems, and automated military units, will eliminate the barrier, and lag time, from the acquisition of a blueprint to deploying the actual weapon in battle.

 

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that in the 19th century Brazil acquires the plans for a state-of-the-art British warship. Without the U.K.’s shipyards, a knowledge of how to build them or skilled workers to man them, merely possessing a warship’s blueprint is a far cry from building it. The Brazilian state would have to invest huge amounts of money and resources to attract people from England with the right skills and know-how, train its native population to build and work in the shipyard, acquire the right grade of steal etc., etc.,. This would take decades of concerted effort. Even once Brazilian shipyards were producing British warships, a crew would still have to be trained, British naval tactics studied, etc., etc., before the military capability of a Brazilian navy even approached that of the British. And by the time Brazil got its warships in the water, British warships would be even more advanced.

 

Imitation has always been cheaper than innovation. But, in the past, successful imitation still required a lot of effort. As the pace of globalization has increased, the speed of imitation has also increased – as the meteoric rise of China demonstrates. But in the future, the time required to acquire all the technological advantages (including military technology) possessed by a competitor will approach zero.

 

Technology is information. The time it takes to copy information varies with format:

  • Digital information – Instantaneous
  • Technical information (skills, knowledge) – several years
  • Organizational information (interaction between workers in an organization) – years.

 

Skills must be learnt by human beings over several years. Skills have two components: reading and experience. Stealing books and reports from a competitor can certainly accelerate the training of one’s workforce, but the workforce of the imitator must still learn through trial and error. The same applies to organizational information, a company may have reports that define corporate policy and protocol, but there will always be an unspoken, implicit corporate culture overlaid on top which a competing rival can only develop through trial and error.

 

Automated systems store everything in a digital, instantly transferable format. When the designs of weapons (in the form of software instructions to a universal manufacturing system), the behaviour of weapon’s systems, and the protocols coordinating how different weapons platforms interact with each other as part of a coherent battle strategy, are all stored in digital format, then a single hack by an opponent could neutralize a technological military advantage that cost trillions to develop within hours.

 

For example, if, in a future where universal manufacturing systems are everywhere, the Syrian government hacked all the information possessed by the U.S. military and U.S. weapons companies. Then, within hours, Syria could put their universal manufacturing systems to work making fully-automated U.S. weapons platforms and become the military equal of America in less than a day! A technological military edge that cost trillions to develop could be lost to a team of hackers working for a small government on a budget of less than ten million pounds.

 

Arguably, high-level encryption could be deployed that may cost 100s of billions for a competitor to break through…

 

The problem is that if country A is a large superpower who has invested trillions into developing state-of-the-art automated military software and has heavily encrypted it to make it very hard to hack, country B is a rival superpower who has invested trillions into decrypting and hacking into country A’s military secrets, then if little nations C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J and K can get a copy of country B’s decryption software, they could potentially access all of country A’s military secrets for a fraction of the price that superpower B spent to initially develop the decryption software.

 

So military technology will become very leaky in the coming information age.

 

In this sense, Vladimir Putin’s comment that “the nation that leads in AI will be the ruler of the world”, is not accurate as that leader will likely get hacked, and lose all its hard won advantage to competitors in an instant.

Instead of one “AI superpower”, hundreds of independent sovereign nations, many ruled by shady dictators locked in regional power struggles with their neighbours, will all rapidly gain access to state-of-the-art technologically advanced, fully automated battle systems.

 

This is a recipe for global chaos.

 

The Criteria for Victory

 

The desirable design features of an automated weapons system fall into four categories:

  • Victory
  • Security
  • Safety
  • Cost

 

All categories involve trade-offs. A human in the loop may increase safety, but may also increase system response time and get defeated by a rival system. Robot swarms communicating with heavily encrypted messages, that can’t be intercepted, might exchange information at a slower rate than swarms with lighter encryption, enabling the lightly encrypted swarm to outmanoeuvre the heavily encrypted swarm. Similarly, a weapons platform that can only be built by a military-grade manufacturing system will churn out less units than one that can be mass-produced by generic civilian manufacturing systems. A weapons system that never attacks friendly units, or never launches an unprovoked strike against a neighbouring country might also be slow to fire at an attacker and get destroyed by it… and so on and so forth.

So designing a fully automated weapons system that achieves victory against all opponents while simultaneously being safe, secure and cost effective is anything but straightforward.

Nations can subjectively decide to focus on designing a safe AI weapon’s system but cannot ensure it achieves victory in battle.

 

On the whole, I think it’s likely that…

 

…the most dangerous developments in military AI will come from the weakest actors…

 

A powerful nation, confident of victory, will likely invest a lot of money into safe and secure AI weapons systems. A poorer country, on the verge of being invaded by a far more powerful foe, will throw everything into designing AI systems with maximum destructive capability, irrespective of safety and security, in order to prevail in a battle.

The U.S. deputy defence secretary, Robert O. Work tells us “there will always be a man in the loop”, but what if the U.S. decided to invade Iran with drone armies and the Iranians found they could achieve victory over America by taking the man out of the loop? Clearly such desperate, rushed measures taken by the losing side of a war could progressively increase the danger of AI military technology.

For example, what if an opponent hacks, reverse engineers and decrypts a rival nation’s battle software and swarming strategies in a degraded and incomplete form? What if their software designers do a rushed job to fill in the gap? Such imperfect, rushed attempts to replicate rival battle systems could produce weapons systems that are simultaneously highly lethal, highly uncontrollable and highly unsafe. Such rushed cyber-espionage jobs might even produce lethal weapons systems that spontaneously attack peaceful neighbouring countries by accident!

 

Weapons Proliferation to Non-State Actors

 

Imagine a simple battery-powered drone quadcopter, no larger than a dinner plate, with a dagger attached. Imagine this system is equipped with machine vision and manoeuvring software and is programmed to seek out human jugular veins, ram into them and then back out. Imagine it can achieve a kill rate, under favourably crowded conditions, of one person every 40 seconds. Imagine a swarm of 10,000 of these drones, can operate in a coherent manner like sheepdogs and corral and surround masses of terrified people before going in for the kill. Imagine these “flying daggers” massacring the residents of one city after another.

This would be an example of how sophisticated and lethal software could transform basic hardware into weapons of mass destruction. If we assume that a futuristic 3D printer which cost £500 could produce these drones a £3 a pop, then ten people chipping in £3,000 each could manufacture a swarm of 10,000 drones, download appropriate battle-ware into the drone swarm from the dark web, and kill whole cities filled with millions of people.

 

But surely states will keep their battle-ware safely encrypted?

While state battle-ware encryption may be too secure for non-state actor to design codes to penetrate, rival states will hire large teams of hackers to decrypt this battle-ware. These sophisticated decryption software packages will likely leak into the wider web. At this point, cults, companies, terrorists, mercenaries, drug gangs and small time hackers will all be able to access powerful decryption tools and obtain the designs of sophisticated weapons platforms as well as the software to control them.

At this point, everyone will have free-access to some of the most sophisticated weapons systems out there. How will the police cope?

 

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions.

 

For example, a blanket international ban on flexible manufacturing for personal use, would be impossible to implement. How do you distinguish “personal use” from use by a small business? Any group of terrorists dedicated enough to want to destroy whole cities would also be willing to set up a small business. Or perhaps you could force all manufacturers to apply for a government-issued permit for every file they download onto a 3D printer, or manufacturing system, but what about people who design their own CAD files? Would they need to apply for a permit every time they manufactured something from a CAD file that they designed? If so rapid-prototyping would become a lot less rapid – and if not, then what’s to stop someone downloading something off the internet while claiming that they designed it themselves? The other issue is that flexible manufacturing is a sliding scale with no clear boundary. So all manufacturing would need to be heavily regulated with a hellish degree of red-tape. But this would make countries that don’t regulate flexible manufacturing vastly more wealthy, while the economy and quality of life in countries that did would diminish.

Cody Wilson’s 3D printed gun is the very small tip of a very large iceberg. If anything, he has done humanity a service by raising awareness of this critical issue early on before the shit REALLY hits the fan.

 

John

 

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