“TECHNO-optimism” is a word most Filipinos may not be aware of, but it is a point of view that is very popular among people who pay attention to technology, AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics.
Briefly, it believes that human flourishing greatly correlates with technological development, in particular through post labor economics, where humans no longer need to work because robots and AI will handle all of the jobs, and income is distributed either as a form of collective dividend or as government transfer payments or both.
A real-world model that the techno-optimists hope to imitate and expand on is Saudi Arabia, which provides heavily subsidized healthcare, childcare mortgage and a monthly allowance for key groups.
Of course, these benefits are the result of oil revenue (not tech.) The Saudi economic system will lose its viability if it could not export energy, which brings us to the current geopolitical state of the world.
Currently, the Saudis are having a hard time because of the conflict in the region, and their leaders know that any disruption to the oil revenue will have repercussions for their economy, which in turn will have repercussions for their social system as a whole.
Techno-optimist abundance suffers from the same weaknesses. AI, Robotics and post-labor economics does not exist in a vacuum. It requires energy, minerals, critical inputs and a stable society, and those are vulnerable to the same constraints oil and energy face: geopolitics. For all that technology has given modern societies, it cannot address the issue of who gets what.
Techno-optimists make their analysis by looking at economics, markets and rational incentives structures. In contrast, one of the pillars of geopolitics is that self-interest governs how states and regions interact with one another, and self-interest is not always formulated rationally.
Rational is the keyword here.
No matter how efficient post labor economics can become, humans – as we define ourselves now – will remain what we are: humans are tribal. The Globalist era showed the limits of one-world cosmopolitanism, and so it will be the same with the AI-led world.
We may get technological abundance, but that very same abundance will not eliminate borders and wars, nor will they necessarily eliminate the geopolitical fissures that have existed throughout history./PN
