26
votes
Will automation affect society positively or negatively?
Many occupations are set to be automated in the near future: truck(lorry) driving, cashiers, and various other service sector jobs. See the full paper here[PDF].
Will such a reallocation of labour be a net positive or net negative?
Will societies around the world adapt by offering ways to retrain those that lost their jobs, or by providing temporary assistance in some manner?
Or, perhaps, will those people who lose when the next automation wave comes just be ignored, as they would negatively affect the capitalists bottom line.
IMO there will be a point at which automation will displace too many jobs for us to ignore the unemployment of a massive portion of the population. Some countries are set up to support that situation through universal basic income. I don't think America will have the necessary shift towards universal basic income quickly enough, though. People will suffer for years while politicians will ignore the matter.
There will be talk of bootstraps, complaints about use of automation overseas and perhaps futile attempts to work within our existing taxation system.
In the end I think automation of most jobs could be a massive boost to the economy and the quality of life of the average human. Whether that utopia comes to fruition all comes down to politics.
I agree with that. Even today, I truly believe that a large number of office jobs are just “busy work.” With some effort we could automate most of it (think data entry, sending emails, etc.) but the sudden numbers of unemployed people would be a much bigger problem for society than having inefficient work processes.
At the end of the day, we as a society need to come to terms with the fact that we really won’t be “needed” after automation grows to a certain degree. That’s fine! I say we set up UBI and allow people to start pursuing their interests (rather than either working jobs they hate just to support themselves or doing something negative with their time). It’s silly to think that no one will be productive without the societal pressure of needing to work 9-5 to support yourself.
If we get to the point where we have strong AI (AGI) it will be interesting to see the effect on society outside of unemployment. Will artists, professional or amateur, feel unmotivated to create works once a computer can create far more and better art than any human?
As of today the closest thing we can reference is the dominance of AI in games like Chess and now Go. People still play chess as amateurs. There are still grandmasters. But perhaps art will be different. It's not competitive. Being the best human chess player isn't so bad, you're just in a different weight class than AI. If we get to the point where the top composers, graphic designers, product designers, are all instances of an AI we might see people interested in those fields lose a sense of purpose.
Left without work for the sake of survival, and art for the sake of admiration, we still have a few options for spending our days. Creating art and doing work, even if not in pursuit of wealth or fame, can both be rewarding by themselves. Most people who paint or sing or write don't expect to ever be the best or even considered notably good at their hobby. So it's likely that for the most part nothing will change in this regard.
One profession that I could see remaining in the hands of humans for a long time, perhaps forever, is hospice. AI and machines could perform surgeries, diagnose illnesses, and design drugs for humans better than we can for ourselves. But there's probably an immutable part of us that will wish to be cared for by other humans. Even in the case of a perfect android I suspect many people would resist being cared for by an AI as long as they know it's not human. If many humans would otherwise feel lost in a lifelong edenic state, then this could be their way out. The result would be amazing.
But this might not provide as many jobs as you'd initial think. I'd imagine that in most cases a sick or elderly person would have family members who could take care of them. Given that almost no one will need to work, the burden wouldn't be so terrible as it is today.
I’m not sure hospice is as universally human as you might imagine.
A great many people do not want others to see them in that state. An AI has the disadvantage of remembering you like that forever, but at least they’re not another person who will judge you for your deteriorating health and bodily control.
I can see that as well.
If we truly have control over the AI we design, then we should also have control over their capability to remember.
The thing is, the pattern of automation you described has already happened (industrialisation, production lines etc). Each time it happened, we created more work ('busywork') and increased consumption. There was a time when 'futurologists' thought we'd all be working 3-day weeks or living lives of leisure, with robot slaves doing all the work. But every time we've had the opportunity to do so, we've reacted in a way that allows us to keep on working instead.
The next wave of automation will create a similar problem. In the most boring possible world, we'd find some way to delay it. If we can't do that, we need a system that will allow obsolete people to keep living. Because what's the alternative? Where will the obsolete people go? Will they be left to starve? More importantly, would our reaction to this crises set a precedent for future automation crises?
The fact that humans not having to work can be seen as a bad thing says a lot about our society.
Probably not contributing a lot to the discussion, just wanted to share this little thought that I saw somewhere.
I'll take on that challenge. I think it goes to the definition of what we consider "work".
I volunteer a fair bit and have been discussion with a few other fellow volunteers whether or not we would continue to "volunteer" if we were being paid for it. Generally the consensus was that if we were paid, we probably wouldn't do it anymore. There's something to be said about exploring your passions without necessarily getting anything back in return. Hobbies and work sometimes can flow back and forth a little. In the future I hope that work in the current sense will take less of our time but our life's work can be a little more fulfilling and wonderful.
Humans not having a purpose is a bad thing, our society is not set up for a life without work being a central purpose to us.
The 50's house wife existential crises was a real thing.
The obvious money problem aside, I think not having to work is great. Doesn't mean you can't do what you do for work, just means you're not obligated to work a shitty job you don't like cause you need to pay the bills. The problem with not working is mostly the fact that you can't live without money and work is the main source of income for us.
If you could have money while doing what you like at your own pace, I don't see how "not having a purpose" is bad. Nothing has an inherent purpose, we make those up. Wanna learn how to work with wood? Go for it. Tired of that? Try learning a musical instrument! Not your thing? Maybe learn how to develop an app for smartphones. Just wanna chill and watch something? No problem. Set your own goals and work towards them.
Depends on future historical developments and geographical region. I fear the worst, as it currently is our society relies on labour to function and propagate. That's why even though automation is increasing you don't see talk of less work hours, only layoffs and the necessity to create "new jobs." I always bring up the seventy something year old Walmart greeters as a good example of useless jobs that still serve a function to society, as backwards as that may seem.
The "automation" or labour crisis will definitely necessitate a change in the way society thinks about work. I've seen a few proposed solutions, such as UBI or federal job guarantee, and Im inclined to think the federal job guarantee is the way to go after looking into it briefly. They are both worth looking into though. These are just band-aids for a larger, structural problem that we all face in the 21st century and I hope we can overcome it and that automation will actually allow for less work and better work conditions, rather than the current trend in which workers are being treated inhumanely and hired to do things we can be doing without. Things such as the strenuous, inhumane labour conditions being employed by Amazon.
When people talk about this issue it usually breaks into a couple of camps. Group A is convinced we're headed for a work-free utopia/dystopia, Group B is unimpressed because printing presses didn't end the world. It turns out that they are both right, and both very wrong.
The element people are missing here is the coming explosion in human-robot teams. The two paired together operate far better than either one working independently. Consider their strengths and weaknesses, which perfectly compliment each other.
Robots are tireless, precise, fast, efficient, and come with a galaxy of knowledge about their tasks embedded in their memory banks (and global robot-information networks, where when one robot learns something, all of the robots everywhere also learn it - and then they all improvise and improve upon it).
Humans are creative, good at time management, planning, handling disruptions and problems rapidly and effectively. Robots can't cope with any of those issues at all, and until we're in real AGI territory with software, they won't be able to do it. They are only good at narrowly defined focused tasks at present, and that's not likely to change for decades.
The logical outcome of this is a pairing. The 'future of work' is you standing next to your robot(s) supervising them and sipping on a cup of coffee. Most industries are already planning and developing for the pairing.
That said, we're in for a massive labor disruption, because driving and retail are the kind of labor that don't really benefit from pairings. This usually gets spun as an end-of-the-world scenario, because it's expensive to retrain a human (2-6 years) and by the time you finish training the human, odds are that job is now automated as well. But - what's the hard part about training the human? The domains of specialty knowledge that robots are better at learning, of course. The upside is you don't need to train a human to be creative or good at managing things - we all do that every day. Training someone to pair with a robot is a hell of a lot faster and easier than training them to have deep domain knowledge. Let the robot handle the encyclopedias. Let the human manage the robot.
We're going to need something like a negative income tax (also known as a stepping stone to UBI) to help bridge the gap, and it's a great opportunity to reform our rube-goldberg welfare system in the process, turning it into something far more efficient and progressive than the willful poverty-trap it is now.
The future looks pretty good. We're looking at a reduction in the work week (probably 6 hour days instead of 8 hour days), a proliferation of robots taking over most menial/physical labor, and a major boost in productivity that will help pay for things like a UBI and universal health care someday down the road. You'll also have the robots in your own home - they will be cheap after all, that's the point. Imagine yourself having a small robot staff not unlike 18th century aristocrats - cooking, mowing, doing the laundry, cleaning up, helping out around the house with your projects.
It has all the makings of a second industrial revolution. The price we're going to pay this time is giving up this ancient, old-world notion that you have to 'work to eat' and that anyone who can't get a $120k a year job is an unmotivated loser. Of course, we're going to have to fight for all of that, because unless we do, corporations are just going to pocket the profits and let half the planet starve. That's the real challenge.
The battle you describe is a long one, uphill, and muddy. Because for every person who sees the binary on the wall, there's another who can't stand the idea of some "lazy loser" not having to work for a living. I feel like this is generational, at least in America, which was never forced to rebuild from the ground up with a 20th-century perspective (WW2 never reached American shores in any meaningful sense). So to a whole generation or two, doing things the way they've always been done is how America became great™
Until people can agree that providing a basic standard of living is progress, automation will primarily serve to enrich the upper class at the expense of the lower and middle.
Yep, I completely agree. It's a slog, but it needs to happen. Once the greedy boomer generation are out of the way (retired, living on social security, or dead) it'll start to get easier. It's a dickish thing to say but I view that group of people who think the 1950s were a utopia worthy of returning to as one of progress' chief barriers, at least in America. Not that they are all like that - just seems like the aggregate of that group has very short-sighted, selfish thinking.
I think automation has been a long process that is just becoming more and more evident in our society now that the tasks automation can do have been expanding. We used to have people on the street selling news papers, more tellers than ATMs, more miners and less machinery, etc. I think it's only lately that automation have started moved towards what we had considered as the exclusive domains of humanity. Now days we have Siri and other similarly enabled devices and google assistant that can somewhat reasonably pass a Turing test. Hopefully, this change brings about a renaissance in creative thought that may be one of the last bastions of humanity. I'm reminded of a show that was on many years ago called Masters of Science Fiction that was narrated by Stephen Hawking where I'm paraphrasing: In the future, humanity may be determined by our faults and imperfections rather than an ideal perfect being.
It's important to note that automation doesn't need to put everyone out of a job before society feels its effects. The Great Recession saw unemployment of about 10%, and the Great Depression was around 25%. I had the numbers around somewhere from a reddit post (that I can't find at the moment), and automating the transportation industry, phone service representatives, and I think food service cashiers and cooks puts us at around 10% unemployed.
Automation will surely create new jobs, but to assume it will create as many as it replaces is a dangerous line of reasoning. If we prepare for the effects of automation eliminating jobs over the next ten or twenty years, I think society will be the better for it. If we don't prepare, well. I hope not to see what that would be like.
Having not thought about it much nor read any articles discussing this issue, here's my take because I've nothing else to do right now.
We're in for a rough ride. The initial tsunami will crest over the poorly equipped and will likely drown them, while those who waver too much and prepped only for the short term will get rolled over by subsequent waves as nations scramble to build effective stopgap levees such as basic income.
Hopefully not too long after that, though, a gradual shift towards more creative roles increasing in demand will slowly replace the grunt work that automation replaces. The foundations are already settling in - mention manufacturing and people tend to think of China, India, Asia in general. Nations still fighting to get to the 'top'. Mention fashion, consulting, or innovation and people will think of richer locales: Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, Korea, Canada, US, UK.
The vast majority of those affected will be in 'third world' countries as client nations start shifting towards fully automated factories, and, for those people... good luck. Throughout the West, most countries have at least some protection for those at the bottom. Even if it's just a food truck. In Asia... not so much.
What your picture misses is the coming back lash against the tech sector, society is going to start blaming the big tech companies for the world we find ourselves in, and that will have a negative impact on how we react to this existential crises
Very true... on top of the increasing amount of dirt being recovered from under the carpet regarding privacy, vote manipulation, fake news. People are content enough for now to not take action, but when they're jobless in a pitch black tunnel and there's nothing in place yet we'll be living in interesting times.
A lot of the answers to your questions depend on:
But assuming you're talking about a western country's average service worker's prospects in the next hundred years, if the existing social, governmental, and economic systems aren't improved and continue to plod towards their ugly logical conclusions, then those people would be at a huge disadvantage. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be a first because there are many historical precedents.
If enough people want it to be, it can be a net positive. If that reallocation is handled passively by most of the population, then it will probably be negative :/
Considering I think societies as a whole can have personality types, I definitely think that some will, but not enough of them. Or at least they won't respond quickly enough, which will lead to lots of needless human suffering as you posited at the end of your post.
It just depends on the job I think. Certain industries can't have automation because people themselves screw up. I'm not a full blown 100% DBA. But a lot of my job deals with DBA related tasks. There's business critical data I manipulate all the time that has to be triple checked. And the backup triple checked. I wouldn't trust automation. Even if the process was somehow automated, a person would still need to go in and check it.
It has the potential to do either. It will depend on how we deal with it. Automation will take jobs, and this is different from every automation revolution in the past as every industry is threatened. If we have the courage to actually take care of the displaced people, it can vastly improve society.
So, my background is case management in rural areas, often dominated by industries ripe for automation - farming and manufacturing. From a social work lens, I think that automation poses a big risk to these communities.
As others here have said, there is a kind of moral debate around the meaning and value of "work." Work for the sake of a paycheck, not necessarily tied to any sort of personal passion or investment, is where a lot of the automation risk is being seen now. From my time working in factories, I know that many if not most of the front-line operators live paycheck to paycheck. In many of the communities in which they live, or at least the one in which I practiced, there are no alternative jobs for people with these backgrounds. Some people in manufacturing have been there for 20, 30+ years. Manufacturing jobs are going away, and while it might be "good" that people won't be working for the sake of work, a lot of personal pride is tied to a person's work. Even a job that people dislike, provided it allows them to feed and house their family, can give a person a huge sense of accomplishment and self-worth. I think a likely result of automation will be a generational sweep of depression as a result of "work = contribution" ideologies passing (if they pass at all).
Personally, I don't buy that Universal Basic Income will solve this problem. It is an economic solution and will have economic benefits. Yes, people who have lost jobs to automation would be able to pay for their housing and food. However, I have worked with people on SSI who have a system of this already. They get a check in the mail, but sometimes feel it is unearned, and this can lead to depression (this is not to say that there are not people who abuse this system). They struggle with trying to find their role in society. I don't have an answer to that, but I think that problem is more important than the economic one. I wonder how society will reshape itself to fit into this. I have to go to work now, but will be thinking more and will post again later.