In 1932, Bertrand Russel penned
a bombastic essay called In Praise of Idleness, which made a harrowing
observation of “the leisure gap.” His much heathen genius recognized the way
work was organized in modern societies with some people sitting idle all day
and others working ceaselessly like labored donkeys. Russel, was, of course,
referring to our long-sought value of work-ethic which says that donkiness is
virtuous.
Parallel to this radical thought
extended the arm of technology and machines geared to replace much of the “big
dirty work” on factory floors and assembly lines in the late half of the 20th
century. Despite the whines of economists and policy-makers, the coming of
technology did not only alter the work landscape but led to greater
productivity, consistency and safety standards in the economy, with previous
skills of workers though slowly, transferred to other areas such as retail and
service. But as we tread further up, affording a bird’s eye view, the picture
looks different this time. In The Rise of Robots: Technology and the Threat of
Jobless Future, Martin Ford argues that the rocketing pace of informatics will
absorb jobs more than it will create or transfer thus building a giant crater
pooled by mass unemployment in the economy. Some of these jobs are what can be
called “bad jobs”, not because they are inherently bad but because of the
nature of their work which is often too repetitive, meaningless sometimes even
dangerous and which churns out the least satisfaction among workers. One such
example is fruit-picking, which Agrabot, a Spanish company is trying to
robotify. The machine only picks the ripe fruit and can reach to heights and
angles which a tall Sapien cannot. Another is driving, which Google’s self-driving
cars with its camera sensors, GPS, and horse-like computing power, are taking
over preventing a sobering 5 million road accidents per year, reducing
congestion, fuel consumption and carbon print in the atmosphere. Box-picking,
which is being mastered by Industrial Perception’s robot has the visual
perception, spatial location, and dexterity to move boxes in warehouses without
back injuries or fatigue. There are bot waiters at Japan’s Kura Sushi
restaurant who are helping to make sushi and serving customers through
conveyor belts.
The demise of bad jobs
It is not an under-rugged truth
that these jobs and many others such as cleaning, lawn-mowing,
burger-flipping, packaging, quality-checking, and mining are driven to
extinction. Fearing that these jobs would be lost, or trying hard to keep them
for the mere sake of employment simply shows a lack of a visionary direction
and good policy making. It is like searching for a quick fix while keeping the
real problem under the rug. In other words, it is like saying “Oh let’s keep
low-paying, low-satisfaction jobs so that we distract ourselves from bigger,
louder and more pressing issues in the framework of our economy. Let’s keep
these jobs so that low-skilled workers have something to hold onto, and let’s
ignore the gushing cracks in the education and social system which churns them
out in the first place”. It is no wonder that Trump’s campaign which played on
the rhetoric of “savior of jobs” did so well.
The Good Jobs
The discussion should ideally
begin when we consider what happens to “the good jobs” as they are slathered on
by technology. Jerry Kaplan in Humans Need Not Apply makes exactly this point.
The 20th century notion that “computers can only do what they are programmed to
do” should be match burned and buried deep in the bowels of earth (or thrown in
a bot bin) because this hour’s feats in machine learning and AIs are enabling
soul-less robots to teach themselves anything from cooking, teaching, caring to accounting, medicine, law and even coding. If what you do, can be learned by
reading textbooks, attending lectures and passing tests, chances are that a
learning algorithm can easily do that.
Machine-learning, which tells
you what stuff to buy and read on Amazon, what to listen and watch on Netflix
and YouTube, who to make friends with on Facebook, and what to declare spam in
your emails, is also being used in medical diagnoses, legal research, stock
markets, and writing programs. The bonded ‘soul of machine’ exists and it is
here by the name of Big Data. There cannot be any artificial intelligence without
data as there cannot be good statistical inferences, pattern recognition and
correlation without it. AI is only fated to succeed because we are all creating
data at furious speeds such that almost all of the humanity’s knowledge was
materialized just in the last two years. And so, every time you write a post,
snap a photo, search a query or just browse the web, you are helping machines
get smarter.
When IBM’s Watson sits in front
of petabytes of published medical journals to learn diagnosis or reviews past
legal cases to predict court’s decisions, it should seem intuitive that it can
do a much better job than any of our human folks. Some might find this
preposterous. It seems far-fetched to allow robots to, in a way, ‘play God’, by
letting them make medical and legal decisions. The truth however is, they can
play God, and they do a pretty good job at this. They can diagnose diseases
with much fewer errors and more accurate ‘hits,' lack of which kills thousands
of people every year or predict legal decisions which are brimming with
vulnerabilities of cognitive and social biases. One of the popular AI memes of
this half of the century is that robots will make decisions ‘on their own,'
which directly emerges from our anthropomorphic view of the objects. Ethicist
and technologist, Nick Bostrom has talked about the AI fallacy, which basically
makes us think that robots are human-like, or that their thinking mechanism
mimics the human brain, the way nature evolved it. “Airplanes don’t flap their
wings” is an eloquent summary of it put famously by Frederick Jelinek.
The Creative Snowflakes
Looking past the big dirty jobs
and the predictable white-collars, a lot many harbor the idea that creative and
empathetic jobs will always remain the unclaimed territory of humans, even
though bots are doing their best to push those boundaries as well. Music, much
of which is already deluged by mechanized ghosts, some of them have started
creeping up onto art, writing, and entertainment. As far as empathy goes, there
are bot receptionists, nurses, babysitters and teachers, jobs traditionally
thought to remain at the discretion of humans. It is true that the ‘care’ these
robots exhibit is fake, or it is one-way, such that only humans get the
pleasing effect during their interaction with the robots, not the robots.
However as the future may unfold, it may not be far enough that a bot writes and
produces a piece of blog article like this one (and does a better job at it!)
All of it surely is
overwhelming, no matter how much one reads up on it, give talks about it, or
write papers on it. In all pinching reality, there bubbles a few good ton of
questions, which we as a futuristic human society need to consider and attempt
to answer. The biggest of them is “What next?” After most of the work has been
unintentionally put at the discretion of robots, and a large chunk of the
population is unemployed, which is an educated hunch corroborated strongly by
most technologists and academicians, what will we all do in that era?
Thomas Paine had an answer in
the 1930s. Universal Basic Income, an idea hugged by both liberals and
conservatives, business people and employees, blue-collars and white-collars,
individuals in the East and the West, mostly because it is to a good degree, huggable. It is workable, it has already been experimented in countries such as
Netherlands, Finland, and India and it is producing results. For example, the
MINCOME project by Canadian government from 1974 to 1979, gave a basic income
to residents of a small town consisting of about 10,000 people. The experiment
did not only help most recipients get above the poverty line, but it also
improved graduation rates, health and birth control.
However many skeptics of this
too-good-sounding deal, bring up the already present welfare state and
unemployment benefits in developed countries, which they argue, has discouraged
many job-able recipients from seeking out work. And if UBI was to be
implemented, which frankly is another form of welfare state, one should better
expect masses of individuals who feel meh about work. Apart from that, critics
also blame the idea for its naïve approach, which is seeing work just as a
means of earning a livelihood, when the fact is that there are many
psychological and social surpluses to ‘work’ itself which cannot be measured by
Econ101 apparatuses. And just because it cannot be measured, does not mean that
it stays out of our policy decisions, and therefore, some might call an
out-of-work society even worse than a collectively wealthy, post-scarce, and
equal society. In "Why UBI is a terrible idea", the author aptly points out some
of the slippery areas in our discussions, including the assault on America’s
most heartily cultural values of work and life.
But here is the problem. The
author was answering the question, what would happen if we implemented UBI
right now, at this very moment, which in all honesty would surely be a terrible
idea, considering the loopholes in our educational, economic, governance, and
social capacities. It would not be an over-statement when we say that we might
not be ready for it yet. Not just yet. Good policy does not only need a good
idea, but it also needs supportive and compatible institutions for it to work
and therefore, we are a long way from doing the necessary duct-taping and
gluing.
The author also seamlessly
laments the current loss values of work and hard-work, which is fair
considering that the robotic future is a radical shift. It might as well turn
out that work itself gets fundamentally re-defined in ways it never did before.
Work in principle would become optional. A choice pursued solely for
fulfillment, joy or to afford better holidays. But what will work really become
like? Many theorists think volunteering, championing causes, art and most
important, entertainment is what most of us will be doing. Nevertheless, our
risen education levels might give us more illumination on more productive uses
of our time. Is it, however, possible that we all become couch rats, maybe
stacked away indoors playing video games till our last breaths? Well, Japan is
facing that problem with its newer generation, who mostly remain unbothered
from bills and familial restraints, thus almost corkscrewing its population
growth.
Is Idleness that bad?
Studies show that the people who
remain in the unemployed demography suffer from sheer psychological and social
loss comparable to that of losing a loved one, mostly because work is tied so
closely to their social status and integrity. However, idleness is different
from unemployment. Idleness, which in Russel’s definition is mostly engaged in
by feudal lords and elitists, who frankly, have both social status and
integrity. And if we microscope history, it turns out many of our
groundbreaking achievements and discoveries did come from people with plenty of
time on their hands or those who were not hampered by financial and social
constraints. And so, will a UBI spur a never-seen era of creativity,
risk-taking, and entrepreneurship? Well, we don’t know yet even
though it seems quite logical.
Between Luddites and Singularitians
On a scale of Luddite to Singularitian, where should we all lie? Luddite is another name for "computer-phobic", a person who fears technology and its implications, the kinds which make movies like Terminator. Singularitians, on the other hand, are optimists who see a human-robot cooperation as an invariable outlook. We don't know yet which side is winning, or rather which is more robustly entrenched in evidence. However, it is crucial to make sure that we are not drawing castles in the air, but taking educated and also practical policy decisions. And thus there are some of the things which every nation ought to do, like reforming education system so that it produces liquid and agile workforce as opposed to ‘specialized skills’ chambers of Econ101. Or re-designing tax-policy to bridge gaps in income equality. Some economists are proposing taxing the robot workers, which discourages businesses from investing in technology to start with. It might sound like a good idea, but when looked closely, it too is a quick fix. All in all, the focus today must lie with the root-grass institutions which inevitably shape the fate of human civilization.
Between Luddites and Singularitians
On a scale of Luddite to Singularitian, where should we all lie? Luddite is another name for "computer-phobic", a person who fears technology and its implications, the kinds which make movies like Terminator. Singularitians, on the other hand, are optimists who see a human-robot cooperation as an invariable outlook. We don't know yet which side is winning, or rather which is more robustly entrenched in evidence. However, it is crucial to make sure that we are not drawing castles in the air, but taking educated and also practical policy decisions. And thus there are some of the things which every nation ought to do, like reforming education system so that it produces liquid and agile workforce as opposed to ‘specialized skills’ chambers of Econ101. Or re-designing tax-policy to bridge gaps in income equality. Some economists are proposing taxing the robot workers, which discourages businesses from investing in technology to start with. It might sound like a good idea, but when looked closely, it too is a quick fix. All in all, the focus today must lie with the root-grass institutions which inevitably shape the fate of human civilization.
Further Reading
Thompson, Derek "A world without work", 2015
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/
Eric and Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in the Time of Brilliant Technologies
Barrat, James, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of Human Era
Minsky, Marvin, The Emotion Machine
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