AI and the Digital Revolution Are Mankind’s Deadly Enemies
Paul Craig Roberts

Does the pleasure you get from scrolling your cell phone compensate you for the frustration from the absence of customer service?  The same digital revolution that gave you a cell phone gave the companies the opportunity to drive up profits and executive bonuses by replacing customer service with AI that is seldom, if ever, programed to answer your questions and is extremely reluctant to connect you to a superior human who knows what to do.  All of us have been stressed out trying to get problems fixed, accounts adjusted, repairs made.  My favorite AI response when I call about the internet being down is “you will get faster service if you chat with us online.”

All of us know the frustration of the constant demands to update our information, our telephone number, our email.  These endless notices always appear when we are in the middle of some activity that is inconvenient to interrupt to go tend to Internet house-keeping problems.  But if you fail to respond too often, all of a sudden you cannot get into your investment accounts, your bank account, your Internet files, because the necessary code, since passwords no longer suffice, doesn’t reach you via cell text or email because you didn’t update.  These kinds of problems are almost impossible to correct, because they use your cell phone number and email to identify you. And even if you can get a human on the phone, the person has no way of knowing who you are except your information on file.

The ability to hack the Internet has grown so rapidly that accounts now have to have double and triple protection, and this doesn’t suffice.  Your password and user name are merely step one.  Next you have to receive a code via cell phone as a text to the number on record. Then a code via email of record. If you didn’t update or made a typo, you don’t have access to what is yours.  Just try getting that straightened out.

And now we hear from Malwarebytes, one of the protective services you can purchase online to protect you against viruses, phishing, and capture of your cell phone and/or computer, that AI is being employed by cybercriminals to craft convincing voice, video, and email messages to defraud both businesses and individuals with sophisticated tactics that result in devastating financial losses, reputational  damage, and compromise of sensitive data. The AI-powered scamming operations can bypass security filters.  As the AI tools are low cost, they can be used on a poor man’s budget.   

Every dollar companies saved by laying off customer representatives has been spent on cybersecurity. As cybersecurity experts will tell you, there is no cybersecurity.  The protections can only make hacking more difficult.  The digital revolution is costing us much more than our privacy.

Malewarebytes gives an example of how the attack on you unfolds and how to avoid being a victim.  Notice that the only way you can avoid being a victim is to be unreachable by anyone whose email or telephone number you do not recognize. But these can also be obtained, and I suspect that it will not be long before scammers contact you via your husband, wife, or child’s cell phone number.  Or something like this can happen.  Your college kid loses his/her cell phone, gets a new one, different number, has a car accident, calls you and cannot reach you because you don’t recognize the number.  Suppose a headhunter wants to offer you a job at $100,000 more than you are currently making, but it is not a number you recognize and goes unanswered.

Already cell phones have gone beyond being useless, as no one answers a call, to being dangerous.  Texting has taken over communication.  People hear one another’s voices less and less.  The digital revolution is isolating people by making verbal conversation problematical.

And the situation is worsening at warp speed. The other day a software engineer I know who is earning in the six figures told me that his employer just told the engineers that they would be replaced by AI in three years. He has a mortgage on a $900,000 condo and is stunned that his expensive education and years of experience are suddenly worthless. Why will Americans go to universities?  What will be the point of education, of public schools? Who among the work force displaced by AI can pay property taxes?

The digital revolution and its bastard child AI, along with nuclear weapons, US blowar labs, and Israel, are the worst enemies mankind has. How is Trump going to make America Great Again when in the third and fourth year of his term there will be mass layoffs of Americans replaced by AI?  Indeed, Trump and Musk have bought into this development and are discussing replacing a large chunk of the civil service with AI.  Why not instead just get rid of the useless work with budget and spending reform?

As an economist I am utterly and totally amazed at the complete and total stupidity of displacing humans with AI.  Robots don’t need food and clothing and entertainment and cars and housing. They don’t have car payments and mortgage payments and credit card payments.  With humans displaced by machines, aggregate consumer demand disappears, so, as no one has a job or any income, who purchases the goods and services produced by AI?  What becomes of the economy?

As I pointed out years ago, and as Elon Musk today confirms, AI and the digital revolution introduce the era of Socialism.  Everyone, Musk admits, will have to be given an income.  Otherwise, there is no point in the AI provision of goods and services. As humans are not involved in production, merit no longer matters.  Everyone will be given the same income.  Equality at last. Indeed, what is the point of humans?  They no longer have any productive function.  Why are they needed?  What do they do with themselves with nothing to do? Why should machines produce substance for people who do not participate in production?  You can see why Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum want to reduce the human population to a small percentage of its present size.

The digital revolution and AI bring us the most dystopian of all worlds.

The First World will be the first to be utterly and totally destroyed by the digital revolution.  But “education” will eventually carry the digital revolution into what was once called “darkest Africa.”

In an AI world universities are superfluous as there are few if any jobs that AI cannot do.  The only remaining jobs would be plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and perhaps sooner or later your friendly plumber will be a robot programmed to run through the programs, one of which will clear your line.

Meanwhile libertarian and free market economists will be telling us that “better jobs” will be created by the digital revolution just as they told us that jobs offshoring would create better jobs to take the place of the old “dirty fingernail jobs.”  These promised jobs are yet to materialize.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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