A
word of warning to those who hope science and scientists will come to
the rescue and Save the Planet with some ingenious method that hasn’t
occurred to the rest of us. Two UCL academics, Simon Lewis and Mark
Maslin, have put forward ‘A manifesto to save Planet Earth (and
ourselves)’ with what they see as the answer to the Anthropocene
crisis (BBC Online, 7 June -
bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44389413). Following the usual
polemical tactic of ‘scare the pants off us’ followed by ‘knock
some sense into us’ they propose a two-fold solution. The first of
these, Half-Earth, involves reforesting and re-wilding half of the
Earth for the benefit of its non-human species. As a way to reverse
environmental pollution and global warming the idea has some merit,
although some re-wilders are surely going too far in suggesting the
widespread reintroduction of wolves, particularly into Britain.
‘Reforesting’ though is often a greenwash term for the common
practice of cutting down slow-growing hardwoods and replacing them
with fast-growing pine and conifer softwood plantations, which is
hardly a like-for-like replacement destined to do anything
constructive about species habitat loss. Half-Earth may be good for
the planet, as the authors argue, but in capitalism it is only likely
to occur if it’s also good for profits, and these two goods are not
normally found in the basket.
The
other idea is the evergreen and ever-present notion of the Universal
Basic Income (UBI), long-time darling of the Green Party and now
floated by Corbyn and McDonnell’s Labour Party, and tried out after
a fashion in small pilots in Canada and Finland. This is the idea
that there would be an unconditional basic income for every adult in
society, regardless of whether they had a job, the aim being to
decouple paid work from consumption and thereby break the
soul-destroying cycle of getting and spending which is supposedly
responsible for runaway consumerism, plastic continents, moral
bankruptcy and everything else.
That
UBI has a lot of support is hardly surprising. To those struggling to
keep heads above water, it would be a lifeline or at least a
polystyrene swim float, while to social progressives it would
represent either a big step towards universal equity (UBIquity?) or
even, perhaps, a back-door exit into socialism along the dark and
dank lower colon of money and class society.
The
problem is, you don’t need a weatherman to know it wouldn’t work.
UBI would have to come out of the tax on the profits of employers,
but these profits are derived from the hard work of the workers, and
the only thing forcing these workers to work hard in the first place
is their relative poverty. Release them from that poverty, and the
employer’s profits accordingly collapse. Imagine if you won the
lottery tomorrow. Would you go back to work? Would anyone? This is
the central dilemma of the worker’s condition in capitalism. We
want more than anything to get rid of the misery and stress. But that
stress is the very thing holding capitalism together, and it can’t
afford for us to alleviate that stress or it starts to fall apart
like a human pyramid injected with a muscle relaxant.
But
this wouldn’t really happen either, because workers would never be
allowed to keep hold of this UBI windfall for long. What the
employers would actually do is start cutting wages across the board,
by roughly the amount of UBI. Perhaps they wouldn’t do it
immediately, but by incremental steps, by failing to raise wages
along with the rising cost of living, until they’d erased the gain
entirely. They’d do this because they’d know that you, the worker
with the windfall, could afford it. And why not? Look at it from the
boss’s point of view. Would you pay £2 for a tin of beans when you
knew you could get it for 50p? No you wouldn’t. And a boss wouldn’t
pay over the odds for a worker either. In the end, the benefit of UBI
would be cancelled out and nobody would be any the better off. The
only way for us to beat the capitalist game is to stop playing it.
Dark
Materials
Douglas
Adams immortalised the idea of a depressed robot in A Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, and Radiohead subsequently sang about a
Paranoid Android. Now a team at MIT has built an AI system that makes
Marvin look as perky as a springtime Pollyanna (BBC Online, 2 June -
bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44040008). They wanted to see what kinds of
conclusions an AI would reach if it was only fed on the very worst
information from all ‘the dark corners of the net’, so they fed
it on an exclusive diet of murders, beheadings and gruesome
accidents, while a control AI got a more balanced input of people and
fluffy animals. When ‘Norman’ (named after Norman Bates in the
film Psycho) was shown Rorschach inkblots, it saw murder,
death, suicide and gore galore, while its control partner saw birds
and vases of flowers. Where happy Harry saw ‘a person holding an
umbrella’, morbid Norman saw ‘a man shot dead in front of his
screaming wife’.
Yes,
it’s tempting to laugh, and why not? Any computational system is
only as good as the information being fed into it, and lately there
has been concern about the intrinsic bias in some of that
information, including charges of ‘machine racism’. As the
article goes on to point out, an AI trained on Google news, when
asked to complete the statement: ‘Man is to computer programmer as
woman is to X’, responded with ‘homemaker’.
The
very fact that scientists can depress a computer is a significant
milestone on the road to utter nihilism, but it’s our own mental
health we should be worrying about. As we have previously observed in
this column (August 2017), an overload of bad-news bias is bad for us
too, making us less likely to see the potential for improving the
world and more likely to give up in fatalistic resignation. Maybe
that’s why the capitalist press loves it so much. But we socialists
at least ought to consider giving ourselves a more balanced diet,
with a spoonful of optimism thrown in occasionally.
PJS
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