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Joe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

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AGI and UBI in the Transformation of Eros in Civilization

Joe Corbett

Within the next 5 to 10 years Artificial General Intelligence is set to replace up to 50 percent or more of the workforce, and perhaps up to 80-90 percent in 20 years, completely transforming how human economies and societies work and play. Among the major problems that will emerge is what to do with all the unemployed that have been replaced by AGI. This moment may be the equivalent of the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the main means for how human civilization is organized, and we need to start reflecting on the implications of all this now.

First, both white and blue collar jobs will be affected by this shift, so there is no unequal class component to it, other than the fact that most of the AGI-tech will be owned and operated by a few tech-oligarch bros and state autocratic agencies, many of whom demonstrate the will to Orwellian-like surveillance and control in their business model and governing aspirations. This means among other things that for a majority of people the American dream of social upward mobility in an endless spiral of increasing consumption until death do us part is over. And that's potentially a good thing for both people and the planet. Without labor to distinguish unequal merit, the inequality game thru consumption is rendered obsolete, sparing our lives and the planet from the endless pursuit of material extraction and plunder that leaves both our lands and our souls in a wasteland.

However to ensure that this transformation will be a good thing rather than an Orwellian dystopia, we are going to have to lobby and protest for a people and planet-friendly transition, as the tech-oligarchs do not necessarily have the best interests of people and planet on their minds as the end-goal for humanity in the future. It is something we are going to have to fight for by organizing a plan for action to see it come to fruition, putting pressure on the tech-bros but also on the politicians who they employ as bought and owned agents (whores, slaves, citizen-employees of capital) with political office campaign contributions.

First on the list of demands must be a cost of living adjusted UBI or Universal Basic Income (along with Universal Basic Services, such as free health care and free higher education) for the survival of those who have been displaced by AGI, and who will become an increasing majority of people over the coming years. And why not? A UBI can easily be implemented with the fiat currency system that already exists in most sovereign nations today. There is no “affordability” obstacle to a UBI of a sovereign currency. A sovereign currency can be created without limit, and without the need for taxes or borrowing of the currency for spending by the nation who controls it. A society that doesn't take care of the minimal needs of the majority of it's people soon loses its legitimacy and will face it's own demise if it doesn't respond. That is the first thing that must be made absolutely clear to the tech-bros and their political whores. They must know that the people will burn down the bordello if all they have is deprivation, degradation, humiliation, and disease for the wider community.

One thing the capital-state alliance is sure to have are well-paid goons of the military-police to protect them from the people. So efforts must be made to somehow soothe these hungry beasts of passion, these troll-guardians of the castle, and win them over with lullabies and music of the muses, as portrayed in the wisdom of mythology. Fighting them head-on in the streets will do little good. Other tactics using wit and stealth may be necessary. But for now let's just assume that the elites and their goon-squads will have just enough conscience for the their own self-preservation to implement a UBI for the people, and crucially, one that can't be revoked for “wrong thoughts and protests of an inconvenient nature”.

Now that AGI has made UBI necessary, and assuming history takes the rational course of action by implementing a UBI, we are left with a situation that Karl Marx foresaw as the ultimate goal of socialism, where the species-being of human beings, their creative potential in the use of tools and language to create their world, can come forth to make history for the first time upon the free will of humans alone, using their imagination (and nature itself) as the limit of their horizons, rather than by the unfree and forced compulsion for survival in the struggle of endless class, tribal-ethnic, and nation-state wars within material scarcity.

With an unconditional UBI, the conditions for the possibility of human liberation will finally be in place. While not sufficient by itself, freeing labor from necessity reconfigures the very relation human beings and all organisms have had with nature and between themselves from their origin. No longer forced to toil under compulsion for survival in the daily activities of life and civilization, something Freud saw as being made possible by repression of libidinal desires (Eros) and its sublimation into useful forms of reason and behavior embodied by the ego (the esteemed self) but at the cost of various neuroses and psychoses, the energetic pleasures of Id and Eros can (with a UBI) be fulfilled without the repression that comes from the main compulsion of civilization — forced labor, whether slave, feudal, or wage-slave.

Not only will humans be empowered by a UBI to be free from forced labor to others, we will be freed from forced labor to nature itself, not having to hunt and gather the daily provisions for survival when AGI can do it for us. The cost in this trade-off will not be neurosis and psychosis, as in civilization, nor unbridled immorality, as in a dystopian nihilism that completely surrenders to Id-Eros in sexual and murderous orgies, but rather the cost will entail ending the unhinged desires of endless consumption to no end but endless ego gratification. That will be the restraint, the necessary repression of a particular historical form of ego-eros (the rational autonomous ego in its triumphant and victorious glory) that can then be redirected and sublimated into the more productively creative desires, such as aesthetic and spiritual fulfillment.

So what do we do with a UBI and the Eros that it unleashes? What is crucial is that we don't turn it into an opportunity to become couch potatoes of the online tech-bro circus (porn and gaming, anyone?), a version of the endless consumption paradigm that we are currently caught within in a death spiral of planetary destruction. That would be an Eros that is still bound and chained to the dictates of capital. Addiction to wealth and the many forms of addiction it casts in its wake can serve as a reminder of what forms of pleasure we must avoid as we construct the worlds we will inhabit in the future of a liberated Eros that still must live within planetary constraints.

One thing that is certain is that gratification of pleasure within planetary constraints will involve constraining the seemingly limitless ego-gratification that comes from limitless materialist aspirations for wealth and its many forms of addiction. Instead we must redirect libidinal energies of accumulative and ever-expanding material production and consumption toward non-materialist and non-accumulative ego-gratification in such pursuits as aesthetic and spiritual practices. This could be part of a larger cultural renaissance with the transformation of higher education once again into institutions of exploratory learning, where knowledge and skill acquisition are pursued as forms of self-development that are ends in themselves, not as a means to an ego-glorifying career.

These are interesting times we live in. We are on the cusp of a transformation that will transform humanity forever. It is filled with promises and perils. We must choose to pursue the kind of desire that can be fulfilled from within our own souls rather than endlessly deferred from without by the false hopes and promises of a world that tricks and enslaves us into serving its own ends rather than ours. Will institutions of higher learning become once again the monastic refuges from a collapsed civilizational model only to be rebirthed into a culture of the arts and learning? Only time will tell, and that singularity is fast approaching.