An Economic singularity
Calum Chace
The Economic Singularity is a term I coined a decade ago to denote the moment when there are no longer any jobs for the vast majority of humans. In mathematics, the word “singularity” means a point when the normal rules stop working, and it was first used in the context of human affairs in the 1950s by John von Neumann, one of the pioneers of computing. It was popularised by Ray Kurzweil, who applied it to the arrival of superintelligence, which he called the technological singularity. The arrival of technological unemployment will be a sufficiently seismic event to be called a singularity.
I think there are five common misapprehensions about the economic singularity – the five As. They are:
- Automation
- Aims
- Awesome
- Abundance
- Avalanche
Automation
Automated factory in China
VCG via Getty Images
Economists have long sneered at the idea that automation by AI can cause technological unemployment. They have two main arguments. The first is that automation has been happening for centuries, and it has never caused lasting widespread unemployment before.
They are mostly right about the past. Automation makes a production process more efficient, which creates wealth, and thus demand, and thus new jobs. I say “mostly right” because automation did cause lasting, widespread unemployment for horses. In 1915 there were 22 million horses working in the USA, pulling vehicles. It turns out that 1915 was “peak horse”, and today there are two million horses in America. That, if you will pardon the pun, is unbridled technological unemployment.
The economists are almost certainly wrong about the future. Past performance is no guarantee of future outcomes. If it was, we would not be able to fly. Most automation so far has been mechanisation, the replacement of human and animal muscle power by machines. Automation is no longer just mechanisation. We are now seeing cognitive automation, the replacement of human knowledge work by machines.
The second argument economists have deployed against the possibility of the economic singularity is the “lump of labour” fallacy. They point out that demand for goods and services is highly elastic, so if one job is automated, that does not reduce a fixed amount of work that can be done in the economy. Instead, the economy expands, and creates new jobs. What they fail to understand (or acknowledge) is that there is no reason why the new jobs must be done by humans rather than machines.
We are improving the performance of machines at jobs which humans get paid for at a faster-than-exponential rate. Moore’s Law is being compounded by algorithmic improvement. By comparison, human performance is improving at a glacial rate, if at all. Driving vehicles, working in warehouses, serving food, writing simple marketing copy, translating – these are all jobs which are fully automated in some environments. Unless we stop the improvement process (which we will not, because the incentives to continue are overwhelming) or unless there is a “silicon ceiling” beyond which machines cannot be improved, then the day will inevitably come when machines can do everything that humans can do for money, cheaper, better, and faster than we can.
No-one knows when the economic singularity will arrive. The leaders of Big AI (Open AI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic) have all suggested it might happen this decade. My own expectation is that this is too soon, because until the economic singularity arrives, effective automation is constrained by human inertia. But 2040 seems a very reasonable possibility.
Will the economic singularity arrive before the technological singularity – superintelligence? Again, no-one knows, but my expectation is there will be a gap of a few years between the two. There is more to life than jobs.
Many economists have stopped sneering about this. But like the rest of us, they are not paying it anything like enough attention.
Aims
The meaning of life
Calum Chace
“Aims” as in “meaning”. What is the meaning of life?
When people start to think seriously about the possibility of an economic singularity, the most common reaction is, “How will we find meaning in our lives without jobs?” This is odd, as jobs clearly do not provide meaning for most people. Gallup regularly does surveys about how engaged people are at work, and in the last one, covering 128,000 people worldwide in 2024, only 20% of respondents reported finding meaningful connection in their jobs. Jobs can be fun, and they can provide structure to the day, but most people get their real meaning from their families and friends, their beliefs, interests, and hobbies – not from their jobs.
The situation is obscured because many of the people who think seriously about the economic singularity are in that 20% whose jobs do provide a degree of meaning.
There are three kinds of people who prove conclusively that you do not need a job to have a meaningful life. The first is aristocrats. For centuries, most of them had no jobs, but they enjoyed the best lives available in their societies, and did not suffer waves of existential angst.
The second is comfortably-off retired people. This is a group that has had the worst possible training for a life of leisure, having been told since kindergarten to look for the next hoop and jump through it. Suddenly, aged 65 or so, they have to stop all that and find meaning elsewhere. And they do. Some middle class people drop dead of a heart attack shortly after retiring, but not many. Most are busy playing golf, gardening, socialising, travelling, and playing with grandchildren. They will not thank you for offering them a job.
The third group that demonstrates that jobs are not necessary for meaning is children. Youngsters find meaning everywhere, and do not clamour for jobs.
Awesome
Robot pampering
Calum Chace
The third misapprehension about the economic singularity is that it will be a bad thing, largely because of the fear of losing meaning, discussed above. In truth, liberating humans from the daily grind of their jobs could be a liberation. People could stop spending all day doing things that someone else wants them to do, and spend it instead doing things that they themselves want to do, like playing, socialising, learning, travelling, exploring.
We will still work, and pursue projects. Humans have been wired to work by millions of years of evolution, and that wiring won’t change overnight. But the work will be self-chosen, self-directed, and meaningful. We could have a second Renaissance.
Teachers often complain that education is too vocational, simply a way to get on the career ladder, instead of a way to furnish and enrich the mind. After the economic singularity, educational could become vacational, not vocational.
Some people will struggle in this brave new world. They will get bored, and succumb to over-indulgence in drink, drugs, and other vices. Most likely, many of us will experience this to some degree at some point. Society is going to have to learn how to help us all get back to more productive and fulfilling lifestyles. Providing this help might well be one way that many of us spend some of our newly liberated time.
The post-economic singularity world need not be a dystopia, but neither will it be a utopia. Instead, if we play our cards right, it could be what Kevin Kelly described as “protopia”: a world in which almost everything is really good. And bit by bit, day by day, it keeps getting better.
Abundance
Of course, there is a catch. The real challenge is not meaning, but income. Without jobs, how will we all pay for the goods and services we need for a good life?
A lot of people think the answer is Universal Basic Income, or UBI. Unfortunately, two of the three words in this phrase express bad ideas. First, people have very different needs, and our needs vary over time. A single mum raising a handicapped child needs more income than a young person starting out in life. So a universally consistent income is not a great idea. Second, a society which only provides only a basic income for its citizens is not doing well. An economy where machines do all the jobs will be producing enormous wealth, and it should do much better than providing subsistence income to its citizens.
These are more than just niggles about UBI, but its main underlying idea is not wrong. A world without jobs for humans is going to require massive redistribution of income from whoever owns the productive assets – the machines – to everyone else. The assets could be nationalised, but experience suggests that wholly socialised economies perform badly, and the assets would also need to be owned by a global body, not the governments of a small number of countries.
Alternatively, we leave the assets in the hands of oligarchs, and tax them enough to provide a generous income for everyone on the planet. This might be less intractable than it sounds. The alternative for those oligarchs is to seclude themselves on heavily fortified islands, and wait for the rest of the population to starve. In which case their productive assets would become useless, because they would have no customers left.
The solution may lie in the concept of Abundance. If the cost of producing all goods and services falls so low that they are almost free, then the burden of taxation on the asset owners need not be unbearable.
We are heading towards abundance anyway. The most expensive cost in most products and services is human labour, and this is exactly what automation does away with. Another huge cost element is energy, and as we move from digging up dead dinosaurs to harnessing the power of the sun directly, energy costs will trend close to zero. And finally, AI will maximise the efficiency of all production processes.
More and more of the services we value are digital, and Spotify is a demonstration of how a valuable service – music – can become almost free. We need to figure out how to create Clothify and Constructify. We need Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism, and over time, we could evolve a better system than oligarchy.
Abundance will help, but the distribution question is a hard problem, and we should be developing possible solutions now.
Avalanche
The fifth and final misapprehension is that jobs will be eliminated profession by profession, and sector by sector, and that the people whose jobs are automated each time will join a growing community of the unemployed. In this scenario, structural unemployment rises gradually, perhaps over several years.
This is the lump of labour fallacy at work. Remember that demand is elastic, so as long as there are some jobs that humans can do for money and machines cannot, then there will be jobs for almost all humans. People will have to change jobs faster and faster, and this will be extremely uncomfortable. Change is always uncomfortable, but we have to get accustomed to it. Change has never been as fast as it is today, and it will never again be so slow.
And the day will dawn when those last human-only jobs can also be done by machines, The avalanche will begin, and we will probably move from full employment to full unemployment much faster than we imagine.
If this is true, then we must prepare – now. The reaction of governments and societies around the world to Covid showed again how quickly humans can react in a crisis. But pandemics are not new, and we had a rough blueprint for how to handle them. The economic singularity will be different, new, and much more impactful. In the absence of a plan, its sudden onset could lead to mass starvation, panic, and worse.
Some mistakes are foreseeable and foreseen, but unavoidable. This one is avoidable. If we fail to prepare, it could be the biggest unforced error our species ever makes.
