Thinking about the future... (Part I)

Recently I read this book which describes a modern utopia of a post-capitalistic society in the digital age. It extrapolates current trends into two possible future scenarios, an optimistic and a rather negative (I don’t dare to say the most negative) one. And I must say, the pessimistic version did not make me want to look forward to such a future! It really stands and falls with the way mankind will handle the climate crisis and whether it will be able to democratise digital technology and bring the benefits of it to all people.

As the book offers such a holistic approach including all aspects of life, I will only tackle the ones I found most influential, which are firstly social order, secondly education and thirdly the re-definition of freedom. I thought I would share some interesting points here, as the book is only in German.

It is stated that the majority of jobs known today will become obsolete once robotic systems and computer algorithms reach a level of higher productivity, reliability, accuracy whilst also being more affordable than human work force. This directly follows from the capitalistic idea and automatically opens up the question, how people will spend their time, earn an income and most importantly will define themselves. Nowadays success and money are tightly connected to our purpose, drive and social status in life.

Interestingly and potentially for the first time in history, not only low-payed, manual jobs will be replaced, but also occupations which require specific knowledge and the ability for fine observation and strategic thinking, such as medical doctors, judges, managers and politicians. These people loosing their eligibility would result in a flatter social order. In an utopian scenario the book advertises an AI-driven government which is meant to achieves a higher objectivity. It is mentioned that every decision made by humans also partly aim at securing their own power and position or simply cannot take all existing data into account and therefore can never be perfectly objective. Our laws aim to treat everyone the same, but if these laws are interpreted and executed by subjective deciders, the system fails on its own ambitions.

The book elaborates on how more equality could be achieved by using personal data-driven decisions to treat not everybody the same, but according to the individual circumstances. Would this be a fairer way of executing law? Of course, this would require the laws to be formulated differently, such that an algorithm can reason upon, while also being more flexible but distinct…

Obviously, it is impossible to predict what the future holds, but utopias generally open up valid questions we should think about. And it is presumably true that a digital society will potentially work completely different to what we have been used to. Most likely it will even need a new political order to start with, as the current system appears too slow and could be potentially fundamentally incapable of handling a digital transformation.