Machines Are Replacing Humans in the Workplace — Is Your Job Safe?

By Cennydd Bowles, Instructor of ProThink Learning online course The Impact of Ethics in Innovation and Technology

In the rise of smart technology, economists and technologists alike wonder if we’ll see the modern-day work week — and the worker — become obsolete. By looking at recent history, we can predict when that might happen and what the consequences could be for society.

We all know the first industrial revolution — a lurch from agrarian society to industrial cities starting around 1760 — but there were others:

· 1870–World War II: Rise in mass production with electricity.

· 1980s: The start of the digital era — circuit boards and transistors, the personal computer, the cellphone, and the internet.

· Today: Smart technologies — artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, autonomous vehicles, and the internet of things.

The technology of today’s industrial revolution is growing exponentially, making the fourth industrial revolution happen at ten times the pace of the first.

Each industrial growth spurt has caused deep dislocations in work and society. The first two revolutions established the division of labor. Once divided, labor was easier to automate, but the effects fell unequally on different industries. Mireya Solís of the Brookings Institute think tank claims that automation is behind 85% of historical job losses in American manufacturing.

The fourth revolution may have similarly grim effects. The advent of cognitive automation means that almost every job is potentially under threat. We could soon see widespread, permanent unemployment forced on by machines.

What Kinds of Jobs Are Becoming Automated?

According to a major survey performed by Cornell University, AI and machine-learning experts predict that this change will happen within our lifetimes:

· Within five years, artificial systems will be able to win the World Series of Poker.

· Within ten years, machines will be able to fold laundry, translate languages, and write simple algorithms.

· Within fifteen years, we will see adept artificial drivers.

· Within forty-five years, we will see high-level machine intelligence.

· Within fifty years, experts predict an AI could write a New York Times bestseller, perform surgery, and conduct top-level mathematics research.

What Does This Mean for Workers?

This storm of change is set to break over a feeble labor market. Profits may be up, but productivity has been lukewarm ever since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Progress isn’t trickling down into good jobs. Just 6% of new American jobs have been within traditional employment. Of full-time workers, a third live paycheck to paycheck.

Tech giants won’t revitalize employment either: tech firms hire only highly specialized staff and have, on average, ten times fewer employees per dollar earned than their industrial predecessors. Anthropologist David Graeber highlights the lamentable rise of ‘bullshit jobs’ that exist solely out of political or capitalist necessity — corporate administrators, dog walkers, telemarketers — and serve no real purpose.

The best-known paper on AI disemployment, by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, estimated that 47% of US jobs were at risk within a decade or two. The OECD puts it lower, at 10%. Some commentators claim that technology-induced unemployment is impossible, and that tech will create as many jobs as it costs. Amid all the uncertainty, one thing is clear: jobs of the future will look very different, if they come back at all.

Even high-status jobs will soon find themselves decomposed into subtasks, with some — finding and processing information, monitoring inputs, pattern matching — performed by machines, and some under human control. This human–machine partnership, sometimes called a centaur, poses fascinating design challenges. How will humans and machines negotiate who does what?

There are bound to be economic effects. If the tasks that make professionals like doctors and lawyers expensive today are best performed by a machine, the price of these specialist professions may plummet.

The Rise of the Gig Worker

With high-skill roles filled by centaurs, and mid-tier roles entirely hollowed out by automation, there may still be menial work that sits ‘below the API [Application Programming Interface]’. These roles will likely exist as a loose patchwork of precarious gig contracts: people moving, assembling, lifting, and cleaning at the behest of an algorithm.

In the present day, the gig economy and sharing economy have ended up bearing a suspicious resemblance to the traditional economy, but with less worker power. For now, competition between gig-work providers (like Uber and Lyft) somewhat props up worker conditions, but gig platforms may yet follow the tech industry blueprint and slide towards monopoly.

In a gig economy, workers struggle to organize for better conditions or pay. Without employment rights or collective bargaining, workers’ only option might be to try to cheat the system. Of course, companies can fight back. In a two-sided market, the platform that connects rider and driver, holds significant power. In a world of algorithmic governance, workers are at the mercy of the platform. Algorithmic logic makes fine cover for abusive employment practices: accept this next job, agree to a smaller cut, or we blot out half a star or throw you off the platform altogether.

For all the deserved controversy over the gig economy’s working practices, many gig workers enjoy the flexibility on offer, or have education commitments, family care, or health issues that make mainstream employment unsuitable. Yet independent contractor status is unfair to people who rely entirely on a single gig position. The best answer might be a new legal status that secures gig workers certain protections and benefits — like unemployment — but, to the relief of platform companies, wouldn’t class gig workers as full employees.

The Inevitable Economic Implications

Two-tier employment — professional centaurs and gig lackeys — will bring about a two-tier society. If you’re lucky enough to tell the machines what to do, it’s likely you own them or are well paid by a company that does. Advanced robots and artificial intelligences will be hyper-productive means of turning capital into labor, which will in turn generate massive wealth. Chinese legal scholar Feng Xiang claims this threatens the fabric of capitalism itself, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) advocates a socialist market economy instead.

In recent decades, wealth has reasserted its dominance over labor. With little to stop capital begetting more capital, inequality is soaring towards levels unseen since the first world war. If the fourth industrial revolution does cause mass unemployment, the economic influence of capital will become even more disproportionate, resulting in the complete reworking of our economies and the role of welfare.

To Avoid Economic Failure, We Must Rethink Employment

The idea of a universal basic income (UBI), a guaranteed baseline payment to all, has a surprising coalition of support. Leftists are fond, seeing in UBI the means to shrug off the yoke of waged labor, increase leisure time, and distribute resources more fairly. Libertarians hope UBI will offer people a chance to decide for themselves how they want to live, and see it as an opportunity to simplify welfare in the name of small government. There is also a compelling ethical case for UBI. Today, important social roles like parenting and family caregiving go uncompensated. A universal basic income would allow people to prioritize this important work over paid labor and give citizens financial independence to pursue their own flourishing. A stable income would help people escape abusive but dependent relationships; disenfranchised people may even be less drawn to extremism if they feel society is providing for their needs.

After years in the wilderness, UBI is again fashionable, albeit still controversial. UBI is politically radical and, as such, easily attacked. Opponents complain that if people choose not to work, the government can’t collect the tax that funds the program, and that any nation that implements UBI will attract heavy inward migration. And both political wings worry their opponents might twist a basic income for their own purposes: the left is afraid conservatives will use UBI as an excuse to slash other welfare programs, with regressive and unfair results; the right worries that liberals will use UBI as the thin end of a socialist wedge. Recent polling finds the US public is split, with roughly as many opposed as in favour. While there’s still much political work to be done, trials in the developing world (Namibia, India, Kenya) found participants’ lives improved along several socioeconomic axes, and the work disincentive was surprisingly weak.

The Optimistic Future

If we find ourselves in a technology-ran, jobless future, how will people find meaning? People’s intrinsic and social value is often linked to their work. This equivalence, though seemingly modern, has its roots in religious beliefs like the Protestant work ethic: an idle mind is, after all, the devil’s workshop. At its best, this mindset encourages us to improve ourselves and work diligently. At its worst, it portrays leisure as sin and suggests if you don’t sell your time to others, you don’t deserve food or shelter. Could the end of jobs leave humanity rudderless and decadent? A jobless world isn’t an automatic utopia; there will still be enormous problems to tackle. Can we overcome climate change? How can we educate the world? Can we finally defeat cancer? Freeing people from poverty and the workplace would let us all focus on these critical issues and fields that truly improve humanity, like science, art, parenting, and music. We can move from work to calling.

“In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be.”

— Bertrand Russell

Seizing this optimistic future won’t be easy. We can expect immense political resistance to abandoning the idea of jobs. It’s unlikely any society will make this transition willingly: the change will only happen once technology starts slicing through middle-class jobs and a post-work future begins to look inevitable. Even then the transition will be painful. Basic income participants took years to adapt to their new personal and financial circumstances; we, as a global society, have centuries of inertia and internalized shame to overcome. Our cultural and political views about work must evolve quickly. Otherwise, we risk a future in which we still look to work for meaning and wages, but there aren’t any jobs left: a world that’s post-worker, but not yet post-work.