Continua la discussione da Varoufakis: Non arrendetevi! La politica è l’unica speranza per civilizzare l’economia e salvare il mondo. Qualche spunto sorprendente da http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/11/30/a-conversation-with-brian-eno-the-guardian/ – un incontro tra Brian Eno, pioniere del minimal rock, e Yanis V.
Riassunto: Si parla della robotizzazione del lavoro, di schemi di reddito di esistenza, di migrazione. Se il futuro è tipo Star Trek (col reddito di esistenza) o tipo Matrix (col capitalismo sfrenato che ci rende prodotti del mercato invece di agenti). Parla dell’ottimismo come una specie di fede senza religione e delle motivazioni dei terroristi di Parigi e l’incoerenza del nostro compasso morale.
[…]
[There follows a conversation that segues from the unpredictability of the market (something Varoufakis is studying) to the unpredictability of human drummers (something Eno is studying), taking in the Kondratiev wave cycle and Hegelian regression, and somehow arriving at the replacement of human workers by robots.]
YV:
Apple has a factory in the US that employs almost no workers, and the factory itself was built by robots, so the question is, who’s going to buy the Apple machines? The robots won’t. Now, how this will pan out is impossible to know. Maybe the crisis is going to be so ruthless that machinery will become so expensive that human labour will get a temporary reprieve. That reprieve leads to an increase in wages, which leads to an increase in demand, and so the machines come back again. At the moment, in the US, a human welder costs $25 per hour, including benefits and pensions and stuff, and a mechanical welder about $18 per hour. But if the level of unemployment reaches the level we have, say, in Greece, the price of a human welder might go to $15. So suddenly the human becomes competitive again.
BE:
There is another possibility: basic income. That is, you give people a certain amount of money, whether they work or not. So you avoid the crushing poverty of people who have no money and you also stimulate the economy, because when people have money, they buy things. We always think money should go in at the top and it will trickle down and people will get employed and so on. But what they tried in Brazil was giving people in favellas about $1,000 for sending their children to school. The result is that people spend that money, and spend it locally, so local shopkeepers benefit, too.
YV:
Services are going to require a lot fewer people as a result of artificial intelligence, so the call centres and paralegal professions will be replaced by robots who can do the job better. Turing said if we can communicate with a machine and we can’t tell it’s a machine, then we can assume that machine is intelligent. Now the Turing test has been passed, that will destroy hundreds of millions of jobs. But will the ones created, making this artificial intelligence, be enough to replace the ones lost? So far with capitalism, every labour-saving technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. The car destroyed jobs for horsemen and stage coach people, but then auto workers and those building the motorways and petrol stations brought more jobs than they destroyed. For the first time, we are running the risk that technology will destroy a lot more jobs than it creates. Now, philosophically, what’s wrong with machines doing our work for us?
BE:
We’re happy to accept that they do a lot already.
Scusate ragazzi, ma mi pare che Brian Eno e Yanis Varoufakis stanno parlando come pirati, citando paragrafi dal nostro programma politico!
YV:
But the question is ownership. With capitalism you have a minority owning the machinery – the means of production, as Marx used to say. If we continue with this and ownership of the machinery gets even more unequal, then that will create huge problems for capitalism because the demand won’t be there. There won’t be enough people earning to buy the stuff that the machines can produce. The way I try to express my own fear of, and hope for, the future is that we have our choice, which is between Star Trek and The Matrix. Star Trek is this: we’re all sitting around having philosophical conversations like in the ancient Agora in Athens and the slaves are not human. There are holes in the walls on the Starship Enterprise; you ask for something and it comes up. Fantastic. So then you can explore the universe and talk to Klingons. That’s one choice – the utopia. The dystopia is The Matrix, where the machines are being fed by our own energy. We are plugged into a false consciousness that the machines have been created to keep us happy. We think we are leading a perfectly normal life, but all along we are the slaves of the machines. So these are the two extremes. And the choice whether we go to Star Trek or The Matrix is ours. It’s a political choice.
BE:
Even at the moment there are people, particularly on the west coast of America, who would say we are living in Star Trek, and there are others, like Evgeny Morozov, who would say we are living in The Matrix. So these utopias and dystopias aren’t in the future – we are actually in one or the other now.
YV:
I think Evgeny is right. We are closer to the Matrix than Star Trek.
BE:
I think we are as well.
YV:
If there are human slaves behind the machine, then it is not Star Trek.
BE:
It’s that thing whereby if you’re getting something for free, it probably means you are the product. People say the internet is wonderful – it’s all free. Actually, it’s not: you’re the thing that’s being bought and sold.
[They talk about the politics of video games and why Darwinism can’t be applied to the free market.]
E mi dispiace che manca quella parte sul darwinismo e il mercato libero…
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BE:
I was saying to my friend this morning, as we were out walking the dogs, “Isn’t it funny that we have created a system which gives the biggest rewards to the greediest people and the worst rewards to the most generous, the people who work in hospitals?”
YV:
Wasn’t that always the case? We had a glimmer of hope after the war that things could change, but they only changed because of the Soviet scare and the rise of the left. The moment the left imploded due to its own failures – our own failures, I should say, as a leftist – there was no reason any more.
BE:
Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody wrote a short essay saying, “What did communism do for us?” I remember Octavio Paz said that communism might have been the wrong answer, but it wasn’t the wrong question. Because we decided the answer was wrong, we thought we didn’t need to ask the question about inequality any more.
YV:
Yes, I think the dialectic between capitalism and communism is fascinating. Are you an optimist?
BE:
I am because I think what you believe is what you make happen. That’s a fundamental aspect of one’s life philosophy. You either believe you stand outside life and watch it, or else you believe you’re engaged and the set of beliefs you take to it forms part of the future. If you take a set of beliefs that is pessimistic and paranoid and defensive – maybe the set of political beliefs North America now has, for example – then you end up with a different future. We are constantly writing our future ourselves. It sounds as if I’m talking about faith, but I’m not – because I’m an atheist.
YV:
I would call myself an atheist too, but I don’t want to be associated with the evangelical atheists who are disrespectful towards theists. I’m completely respectful towards people who have faith. Richard Dawkins is religious in his anti-religion.
BE:
Yes, he has become that. If you love gospel music – as I do – you can’t not see the value of a certain type of religious experience. The fundamental thing that is happening in religion is that people are surrendering.
YV:
We surrender, too – to optimism. I have no empirical data that makes me optimistic about the world or human nature. If I was a pure empiricist all the evidence is that we’re a very nasty lot, but I’m not allowing that to come in the way of my faith, which is in humanity. So I’m completely optimistic through my heart, and I do not allow my brain to rule over my heart.
BE:
It’s an act of faith that creates its reality.
YV:
We have faith; we just don’t have faith in a divinity.
Possibile buttare talmente tanta saggezza in una conversazione di mezz’ora?
BE:
It’s interesting to see everybody’s reactions to Paris. It is not completely kitsch and sentimental that when something like this happens everybody else says, “We don’t agree with this: this isn’t us.” People don’t ignore it. It will be worrying when people start ignoring it, and just carry on with life as normal. And I don’t think it has created the simplistic characterisations of anti-Islamism.
YV:
No, but it does add impetus to closing down borders and re-erecting barriers, and that worries me. But you were saying optimism is almost like religion – it is a faith. So you can look at what happened in Paris and empirically deduce that the world is going to be a very bleak place, or you can choose to be optimistic about it. It’s an activist optimism. These people are prepared to sacrifice their lives in order to close minds and close borders and erect barriers; the great question for us on the receiving end is, “Are we prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to keep the borders open, and to open minds instead of closing them down?”
BE:
I read an interesting book by [the anthropologist] Scott Atran called Talking To The Enemy. He spoke to a lot of jihadis, and tried to decide what their moral compass was. And he said they almost all agree the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was completely immoral. So they are not amoral, which is interesting. One of the people Atran quoted said, “But they were just innocent people!” It’s interesting that he would have that mindset that they were innocent, but the ones they killed were not.
YV:
Look, I hate to do this, but I try to get into their heads. If you look at the bare facts of the last two months it is tit-for-tat. That is how they see it. So the Russian air force bomb Syria; they bomb a Russian plane off Sharm el-Sheikh. The French air force bombs Syria; they do what they do in Paris. The Hezbollah people join Assad against them; they bomb Beirut. For them, this is what war is about. And we have to learn to see this, because if we think that a stray US air force bomb killing 150 people in Syria is acceptable collateral damage but we go crazy about Paris, then our moral compass is problematic.