AI is taking our jobs. Does that mean I can spend more time lolloping on the sofa?

Any chance there's a technology that can give us prosperity, freedom and NOT kill us all?

Wall hanging from my parents’ house. Made in India. Artist unknown.

I’ve been reading

Sarah Wilson

’s recent posts about how AI is coming for all our jobs by the end of 2027. She discusses the viral AI 2027 forecast, written by a group of leading AI experts. According to its authors, this time is different from all the other times the robots have come for our jobs because, this time, we won’t be able to create new jobs to replace them because AI will also be able to do those jobs better. Humans will become obsolete as workers. In, like, two years.

My gut reaction to this was: please, AI, come take all my jobs. I could do with a bit less time doing pointless meaningless work for money and a bit more time lolloping on the sofa watching Nobody Wants This.

Of course, a sightly more evolved, rational, bit of my brain knew that this is not how things are panning out. The tech overlords are unlikely to use AI’s efficiencies to bring prosperity and freedom to us masses. They are not exactly sending the message that they will share the profits, never mind share ownership and decision-making control over how we use the technology that they are unleashing.

Instead, the economist

Yanis Varoufakis

has written a book arguing that we are already in a state of ‘technofeudalism’. Far from using technology to bring us freedom and leisure, the ‘broligarchs’ have used technology to turn us into latter day serfs, forcing us into low paid, precarious work while gutting democracy.

So why don’t we just have a revolution, take over the robots and use their amazing efficiencies to bring in an era of luxury communism for all? Bob’s your uncle, technology is working for the people.

My lolloping-yearning self is 100% on board. But a third part of my brain is setting off another alarm. What about the small matter of AI incinerating and parching the entire planet Earth?

As Wilson writes, every simple Chat GPT task costs a bottle worth of water. The global AI demand in 2027 is projected to account for 30–47 million people’s yearly water consumption — roughly the population of Canada. As

Naomi Klein

and

Astra Taylor

have noted, former Google executive Eric Schmidt told Congress that AI’s ‘profound’ energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough.

Hm, tell me if I missed the memo guys, but I thought that we had to stop with the fossil fuels if humanity is going to survive, not massively increase them?

The tech-economy-politics-environment matrix

So technology is doing three things simultaneously. It is being used to make us all poorer (except for its overlords who are plotting to colonise Mars and undergoing blood plasma transfusions from their children), stamp on our freedom, and kill our planet.

This doesn’t sound like a fantastic deal. I think I’d prefer the opposite on all fronts, please. I vote for technology that 1. increases everyone’s living standards, 2. enhances our freedom and 3. makes nature more thriving.

We’re taught it’s not possible to have all of those things together. We’re told that there has to be a trade off between technological advancement and one or all of those other things. At best, our leaders are asked to carry out risk assessments to evaluate those trade offs (which they don’t do) and calculate quite how damaging they will be.

Nobody in power seems to be saying that there don’t need to be those trade offs in the first place, and that actually we can and should be designing technologies to improve quality of life, freedom and ecological flourishing for all.

This is exactly what the social theorist and founder of social ecology, Murray Bookchin, had in mind. He saw that the spheres of the economy, politics and the environment are interconnected, and it is often technology that connects them. Technologies can either enhance wellbeing, freedom and nature, or harm them. Our leaders, obsessed with profit and power, tend to shove this reality under the carpet.

In Ecology of Freedom (1982), Murray Bookchin wrote that the point of all technology should be to make nature more ‘fecund’. This blew my mind slightly, firstly because I had to look up the word ‘fecund’ and secondly because it had never really occurred to my city-dwelling self that there didn’t have to be a trade off between technology and the environment, that we can simply choose to only invent technologies that have a positive impact on nature.

Murray Bookchin, 1921-2006

In Bookchin’s vision, decisions about technology would be made in a genuinely democratic way. In fact, all societal decisions would be made democratically. For him, caring for the planet went hand in hand with the entire concept of freedom. In this definition, freedom wasn’t about doing whatever the hell we want regardless of how it hurts other people or the planet. True freedom is about all of us getting to have a say in how to meet our needs in a finite and precious world.

This kind of deep democracy extended fully into the economic realm. Bookchin advocated a kind of confederalism, where small-scale communities manage their own provisioning systems, in partnership with other communities. Everybody would have a say in how their community was run. Technology would be designed to facilitate these democratic processes — which would in turn never take their eye off the prize of making nature more ‘fecund’.

In short, in Bookchin’s vision, all the different parts of society would work in harmony with each other and with nature, rather than being in world-destroying tension. It’s not rocket science really, and Indigenous communities around the world have been saying this all along.

Lolloping rights

And what about the lolloping? In Murray’s world, could the robots take our jobs in a good way, leaving us more time to enjoy ourselves? The first point is that, because the kind of society that Murray imagines isn’t just geared towards making endless profits for those at the top, a lot of jobs could just be culled without needing high tech digital tools to do it. Just think of all the work that literally serves no meaningful purpose but we have to do purely to get money to stay alive, and that ultimately lines the pockets of some rich dude. These are what the dearly departed anthropologist David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’.

We could simply ditch those jobs without immediately falling into abject poverty, because we wouldn’t be all be dependent on earning wages to stay alive. Instead, Bookchin had two more lovely concepts: ‘usufruct’ and ‘ the ‘irreducible minimum’.

Essential resources like land and water wouldn’t be owned and controlled by cackling cartoon villains bent on turning us all into their serfs. In fact, resources, or what Bookchin called the ‘means of life’, wouldn’t be owned by anyone. Instead, they would form a commons based on the principle of ‘usufruct’ – meaning that everyone is free to use them as long as they do not damage or deplete them.

The principle of the ‘irreducible minimum’ means that everybody is entitled to access the means of life no matter what they contribute. This is an even more generous maxim than Marx’ famous ‘from each according to his [sic] ability to each according to his needs!’ No means testing, no judgement or stigma, everybody is enough and everybody gets enough.

So, yes, I could lollop as much as I wanted. And trust me, that would be a plentiful amount. But because work would be for my community and the health of my home planet, and because it would be strictly limited to what is necessary for us all to live well, I probably wouldn’t mind mucking in with the eco-robots to do some of that, too.