dystopia Archives - Common Sense with Paul Jacob

While I sit way out here on the margins of big technological trends, Elon Musk pitches a very science-fictional near-future.

“With robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all,” he said at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos. “If you have ubiquitous AI that is essentially free or close to it and ubiquitous robotics, you will have an explosion in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.”

The world’s richest man predicted that humanoid robots will soon become pervasive: “there will be more robots than people.”

I’m not much of a science fiction reader — does Nineteen Eighty-Four count? — but from movies and friends’ book suggestions, it sure seems that sci-fi writers have not predicted universally cheerful outcomes from Elon’s prophesied robot population explosion.

How would we control such creatures? Isaac Asimov wrote a lot about this, using his “Three Laws of Robotics,” a Three Commandments for artificial beings. The first reads “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” But surely another scenario is more realistic, Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids (1948). There the shiny robots — primed with “To Serve and Obey, And Guard Men From Harm” — set up a totalitarian society without the State.

Just the humanoids, nannying humans about.

What would life be like with all these “helping hands”?

Remember Thoreau’s warning in Walden (1854)? “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life. . . .”

Ronald Reagan quipped that “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

Elon Musk merrily imagines an “upgrade” to busybodies and governments.

Artificial busybodies and governments. On auto-pilot.

Terrifying.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Nano Banana

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The Portlandia Problem

Whatever happened to Portland, Oregon?

Describing two “anarchists” in that riot-torn city, Nancy Rommelmann paints quite a picture in the May 2021 issue of Reason: “They are outfitted in the black bloc uniform of head-to-toe black; the boy carries a steel baton and wants me to know it. There is nonetheless something patrician about them, as if under different circumstances one might encounter them at cotillion. The uniform conceals their identities, but it can’t hide the sense of entitlement that allows them a cheap laugh at the cop, at the fan.”

The mocked cop? Sitting inside a federal building next to an industrial fan airing out the place after being attacked . . . with a thrown bucket of diarrhea.

Ms. Rommelmann wonders why these miscreants think it acceptable to throw excrement around.

“‘Do you believe that property is worth more than human lives?’ asks the boy.

“‘Do you believe the police should be allowed to murder people?’ asks the girl.”

Rhetorically.

For there had been, that year, only “one deadly police shooting in Portland.”

Thirteen years ago, Portland’s anarchist craze was still latte liberal, when 75,000 showed up to cheer on candidate Barack Obama. That was when it was “a little bit goofy, a little bit twee,” as Rommelmann puts it.

What went wrong?

Well, both city and state are solidly Democratic, and the Democrats’ leftist pieties disabled them from ever standing up to the violence of ideologues.

Utopians with every instinct to turn common sense on its head can only take each failure to establish their ideals as an excuse to turn up the volume. And violence.

Our civilization has seen this before. The utopians bring only dystopia.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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