RoboNomics

Author's Note

"This is how successful people live. They're good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then? Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy - that is every man's tragedy."

-Philip Roth, American Pastoral.

Author's Note, 2023

It's interesting for me to look back at my original author's note that evolved between the completion of the first draft of RoboNomics in 2013 to the final edit on that version in 2018.

It's especially interesting given my insistence that RoboNomics, 2013, was a reflection on the financial crisis of 2008.

Having survived that crisis and found a new career, I can now look back on another with consequences still unfolding in the specter of recession: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even more pressing, coming out of that crisis, is the rise of large language models that are generative, and far more powerful than anything that's come before. The following story is an exploration of what comes next, and how it will affect our economic realities and daily lives.

Updates to the Story

There are two types of updates that RoboNomics has undergone between the 2018 version and this new 2023 version: tech updates and story updates

Tech

Writing in 2013, I did a ton of research on leading- and bleeding-edge tech to create a Toronto 10-20 years in the future. But ten years on, a lot of the tech contained within that story actually exists and is accessible to consumers today. So I did an update that includes tech in a future Toronto 10-20 years from 2023.

The type of artificial general intelligence described in the story is still beyond humanity's horizon, as are many of the other technologies described. The point here is not necessarily to tell the future, but to make the near future seem realistic - to the best of my ability.

Story

In the original, Andrea and the rest of the RoboNomics cast were in their early thirties. And while us millennials can relate to the pressure of having your life set by that age only for it to be put on hold by yet another financial crisis not of our making, I feel like some of Andrea's decisions and personality make a lot more sense if I de-aged her by ten years.

If you've read the original story, then, say hello to Andrea, age 22.

The other huge change to the story is the pacing. They story is about half as long as they original (which combined a first and second book), and the action is quicker paced which I believe makes the story much, much stronger.

If 2013-2018 RoboNomics was my first feeble attempts at writing a novel-length story, RoboNomics 2023 is where I actually have a handle on it.

As you read the new version and in reference to the original author's note below, I hope you'll see some of those same themes woven throughout. I have lots - tons - more to say on the topic of automation, AI, and their economic effects, but I'll save that for my Medium articles. :)

In the meantime, enjoy!

Original Author's Note, 2018

RoboNomics started, for me, as an idea in April 2011 that I drafted until 2013, when I work shopped it through the Humber College Studio program in Creative Writing.

It was inspired by the economic crisis of 2008 and how economies could change as automation increasingly takes over whole industries. But in the end, I came to realize that it was not about money. It was never just about money.

While others like to dwell on the possibility of artificial intelligence and how its birth would inevitably lead to a Frankenstein scenario in which the entire human population is decimated, I am rather of the mind that the consequences are far more benign. But at the same time, they are far more devastating than loss of life.

As a writer for most of my life, I've always thought that the highest form of human activity is work. But not just any work. Much of human labor is in the form of repetitive, soul-crushing hell. But when each of us is working at the limit of our abilities at something that we were born to do, life is like a heaven on earth: time speeds by, we are content. When all of our basic needs of taken care of: when we have enough water and food, shelter and love; the thing that we require to be balanced, healthy beings is fulfilling work.

At least, that's what I thought.

But what happens when machines of our own making become better at that work than we are? This is not some far-off science fiction possibility, but something already happening in the world today. Not only are robots and automated processes becoming better at simple grunt work than us, but they are also becoming better at those tasks that we consider define our humanity. Things like art, music, and scientific discovery - even writing: tasks for which we think are reserved for only the best of human minds are being done by machines.

So where does that leave us? If we didn't have to measure our lives through money, many of us would pick up our hobbies and work at those instead. But what about when we have nothing left to give that is better than what our machines can give us? How will we measure the worth of a human life then? If there is nothing left that we can work at, nothing at all - how will we define our place, as a species, in the universe? Humanity may never be decimated by our own machines, but what happens when our place in the universe is taken up by our machines? What happens to us when we become existentially redundant?