The text message comes through from my BBC Radio 4 producer. It looks like our next season of my programme “FutureProofing” is going to start with a show on the Apocalypse. A thought hits me. If it’s coming, the apocalypse, what can any of us do about it? I’m working on a Plan B, but holding out hope for a Plan A.
My Plan B? In one word, it’s the chisel. And here’s why.
I’m in Singapore, for “FutureProofing”, and I’m inside a new driver-less car. For the first 250 metres it all works great. No hands on the wheel, the miracle of artificial intelligence. Then the car starts to swerve, purposefully, onto the wrong side of the road, on a dual carriageway, in front of an oncoming dumpster truck. The emergency driver lunges for the wheel, yanks us back to safety then says:
“Okay, that didn’t go that well, but you’ve got to understand this isn’t a plain vanilla driver-less car. This is a DIY driver-less car.”
And it turns out it’s built with off-the-shelf supermarket technology, USD7,000 worth, and the goal is to roll it out as quickly as possible.
But what really scared me was what the Ministry of Transport team said next. Step one, they explained back at the Ministry, is driver-less cars. Step two is to fully automate the economy. Step three is to put all citizens on universal basic incomes. Step four, with Northern Jakarta going underwater from climate change, is to close the doors to migration. To do anything else, the Ministry of Transport told me “would be too socially complex.“
The deployment of such advanced technology, not least AI, will potentially blitz 47 per cent of US and UK white-collar jobs by 2035, according to Oxford University research. This, then, has economic, social and, ultimately, political consequences.
Which brings me to the chisel. In a society where the haves are starkly divided from the have-nots, where the algorithm-owning class amasses shareholder value at the expense of jobs, and mass production business models and associated government revenues collapse, if you want a roof over your head, chances are for most of us you’ll need to learn to build it. And that means getting to know how to wield a chisel.
But my money is on Plan A, and here’s why. One morning in the St Raphael’s housing estate in Brent, north west London, Sammy, a 15 year-old son of a Somali single mother, heads off to school. His mother pokes her head around the door to check he’s made his bed, and from somewhere under the bed she hears a quack. She rummages around underneath the bed, and there she finds, hidden away, the old family aquarium that she thought she had thrown out. In it is Sammy sister’s lost hairdryer, a thermostat, a lightbulb and a small, happy, family of quails (hatched it turns out from a quail egg carton that Sammy has saved up his pocket money to buy).
Now, two years later Sammy has raised GBP2,000 from a crowd funder and turned an old waste dump into a full-scale organic farm, with not just his beloved quails but chickens, a bunch of veg and a giant community tepee. When I visit there are pheasants flying in and out, and volunteers from a local bank on a team building exercise.
What’s my lesson from this? Sammy had zero assets. No training, no cash, no networks. Just his own brains, passions and access to a YouTube maker channel. Out of that, he managed to magic up a living ecosystem.
The rules are changing. We are entering into a new technological revolution, moving from the age of mass production to the age of the algorithm, an age with a new set of technologies whose barriers to access, ownership and value creation are starting to drop.
What's my Plan A? To pick up these new technological tools, unlock some untested capabilities, and be part of a movement that relocates intelligence and creativity not just in the machine but in people.
