You say you want a revolution!

Cover art for the single “Revolution”, by The Beatles, via Wikipedia

I didn’t realize there were two Revolutions.

Of course I knew the song Revolution, but unlike people who owned the White Album, my exposure to the Beatles was almost entirely through the “Red” and “Blue” compilation albums, and whatever I heard on the radio. Thus, I was only familiar with a relatively small part of their total output.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were TWO “Revolution” songs on the White Album – the “usual” one, and the so-called “Revolution 9”, which is better described as a sound collage. Hearing this for the first time, I found it very interesting, and my reaction was reminiscent of my reaction to the work of director David Lynch – in the sense that I recognize the ability, competence, and even brilliance of his work, but I don’t know if I can really say I like it... It’s very confusing.

At any rate, the better known song is one of the few Beatles songs with a clear political message. In the late 1960’s, there was a large counter-culture movement, which included both anti-war and anti-establishment groups. While John Lennon was certainly anti-war, he was not generally considered to have been anti-establishment at that time, and appears to have been concerned about the moral implications of the goals of a number of groups on the left, which believed that violent revolution was desirable, inevitable, or both.

The main idea of the song appears to be that there are problems in the world that need to be solved, but that violence and hate are not the answer. To me, at least, it seems to be almost a prequel to “Give Peace a Chance”, which was released the following year.

Of course there are far more than two revolutions, which is how we get to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It’s hard to get online without seeing a thousand opinion pieces about the “AI Revolution”, but most that I have seen miss what I consider a critical point.

Human history is littered with periods which can be described as “revolutionary” in one way or another. Though fast in terms of human history, most of these “revolutions” took decades or centuries (or longer, in some cases).

In most cases, there was a direct connection to human capacity. The use of stone tools, for example, improved our ability to hunt and build, but still depended on humans. While a farmer using an iron plow and draft-animals could cultivate more land more quickly than a farmer using a stone hoe, there was still a direct dependency on the individual farmer.

Then came the Industrial Revolution.

This time, it was different. While wind and water power had been used for centuries, there were a number of technological developments which came together in ways that allowed for dramatic increases in production output. The use of steam power, improvements in iron-making, and the invention of machine tools set the stage, and textiles can be considered the first act.

To simplify, setting aside the impact of cotton on both technology and society, textile production is dependent on raw materials, spinning, and weaving. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, it took approximately 4-8 spinners to supply one hand-loom weaver, but by the 1760’s, new inventions such as the spinning jenny appeared, followed quickly by enhancements to increase the strength of the yarn and the quantity produced, leading to a period of enormous innovation, industrial espionage, and a radical increase in the availability of textiles.

By the 1780s, these various machines started to use steam-power, which dramatically enhanced the amount of productivity which could be supported by individuals. But still, there was a dependency on those people, and while there were a lot of jobs “lost” for spinners and weavers, vastly more jobs were created. These new machines needed to be designed, built, and maintained, and still required operators and supervisors. There was construction required for the new facilities in which these operations took place, along with the infrastructure for the steam power, fuel transport and storage, transport of supplies and finished product, and so on. The overall productivity was vastly increased, though the profits were by no means equitably distributed – perhaps a topic for another post.

Jumping forward, to the mid-twentieth century, the development of the integrated circuit led to the “information age”. Taking music as a small example, traditional physical media evolved from records, to magnetic tapes, to CDs, and now to entirely digital media. Here as well, many jobs were lost, but more were created.

Much of the shift in the West has been from an industrial economy to a “service” economy. I would argue, however, that while more jobs were created than lost, the proportion was much lower than in the 18^th century. In any case, one recent article I found questions whether that is the wisest course forward, or whether some degree of shifting back to a so-called “re-industrial era” should be preferred.

But this is where I think many people miss a vital consideration.

When we consider the “AI Revolution”, we’re talking about machine learning, LLM (Large Language Models”, advanced robotics, and many other technologies which make this period fundamentally different from prior “revolutions”. In the early days of computers, we had people designing them, building them, operating them, and programming them, and then others using the results of these programs to do things faster and more efficiently than before, and then do new things which were not previously possible or practical.

So far, so good!

But now we have systems which are more complicated and complex than is possible for humans to manage, and that’s why we have computer-assisted design, and computers managing the machines we use for manufacturing. There are still humans in the loop, but far fewer.

And robots are now doing much of the work that humans used to do. Traditionally, robots “struggled” with complex, unpredictable environments like loading and unloading, but companies like Boston Dynamics have humanoid robots like Atlas, which can operate in almost any place a human can, and have hands that are approaching the capabilities of human hands.

In the past, most robots were controlled by humans, but AI is now more and more involved in that as well.

So, in the past, these industrial revolutions eliminated jobs, and created more, but now we have computer programs building other computer programs, and robots building other robots, under the management of AI systems...

Will jobs be eliminated as a result? Yes, definitely. It’s already happening in some industries.

But it’s all ok, because jobs will be created as well, right?

New jobs will certainly be created – at least in the short term. As an example, some programmers are finding work cleaning up the messes created by “vibe coding”, but this may be a niche market that will shrink as the quality of AI coding improves.

Will other brand-new jobs be created? Almost certainly, but I don’t think there is ANY realistic expectation that more will be created than eliminated.

The real question, though, is what are we going to do about it?

We are on the verge of having technological capacity which far outstrips our survival needs. Will we use it to eliminate hunger and poverty, provide universal healthcare and allow people to live as they wish? Or will we use it to create a dystopian hellscape, where a few live lives of unimaginable luxury, while the rest live in squalor?

Is it unreasonable to want good things for everyone?

Cheers!