The Elephant in the Room

I've been meaning to make this post for quite some time, concerning probably the biggest social issue bearing down on us now in the glorious 21st century, but have somehow never quite got around to it.  But then I saw a post (no link or descriptor, since it was locked), which exemplifies the problem at a personal level, and so I am prompted to get around to making this post.

The issue is simple: What are all the dumb people - and, hell, even the not-dumb-but-not-so-smart people - going to do in this age of modernity?

Progress marches on.  Life becomes increasingly complex.  And as we are seeing, more and more, there are fewer and fewer jobs - or indeed, functions in society, employed or not - which anyone below, let us say, an IQ of 110¹ is mentally equipped to perform.

That, by the way, is about 75% of everybody.

But if you're wondering about the growth of the permanently unemployed class, or increasing wealth inequality, or the trend towards outsourcing unskilled and semi-skilled jobs, well, that's the explanation in a nutshell.  See, back in the day, there were plenty of jobs that fit the range of capabilities for IQ < 110, but these days, we have machines to do that sort of thing.  Anything that doesn't require significant intelligence or creativity is capable of being encoded in software or carried out by a robot.

(Used without permission of Despair, Inc.)

(Outsourcing-wise: no, foreigners aren't smarter.  They're just willing to work for a standard of living that makes them - for now - cheaper than the software or the robot.  As soon as the emerging markets catch up to the developed world in terms of lifestyle and expected pay, the people filling these jobs over there are going to be facing the exact same kind of bind you are.  Much the same goes for the sectors dominated by illegals.)

Education?  Education won't fix it.  We're not talking about the ignorant, we're talking about people who lack the capacity to reason at a given level, to abstract, to problem-solve, to think creatively, to intuit, to deal with the unanticipated, and there's not a damn thing education can do about that if it's not got anything innate to work with.

And what's left?  Jobs with terrible pay and no prospects, and especially service jobs involving being on the 'phone or behind a counter or asking if you want fries with that, because human interaction hasn't been successfully computerized yet.  But don't get too comfortable, service workers of the world, because there's a horde of AI and affective interface researchers working to throw you on the scrap-heap, too.

We needn't expect a political solution to the problem.  Even if all parties would recognize the problem, there is no way, under the current democratic system, that any party can speak up and actually say this: namely, say to 75% or so of the species that they're useless, they're out-evolved by our technology, they're surplus to requirements, they no longer have any function in society; the world, in short, no longer needs them.

And even if they could, what do you do with hundreds of millions of surplus people, who - let me remind you - not only presently exist, but keep coming into existence, and would do so even if none of the existing ones ever had children, since intelligence is not strictly and controllably heritable?

Can't just line 'em up and shoot 'em.

Put them on pensions for life?  Yeah, that'll work well.  Ask anyone with sane views on welfare about the delightful effect that permadependency has on people.  Not exactly going to win you points for human dignity, is it?  And you can say much the same thing about make-work, and/or "jobs for humans" that they are going to know are nothing but a subsidy and deliberate inefficiency.

And I don't think you're going to get people to sign on to a policy of deliberate retrogression, either.

...but someone had better come up with something (transhuman intelligence-augmentation technology would fit the bill; more money for IA research!), and that right speedily, because this problem is heading right at us, right now, and it's not going to get any better over time.  In fact, short of an unanticipated computational-sophistication halt, it's only going to get worse.

Doom.

1. Or other measure of g of choice.  Spare me the pedants arguing over exactly what general intelligence is; we all know it when we see it, or talk to it, or employ it...