It’s happening at my train station. They started putting up little “experimental” kiosks about five months ago, wrapped in plastic, in the stairwells. The kiosks provide for automated pass entry to board a commuter train into the City of Philadelphia. No longer will it be necessary to place four quarters in a slot by the parking lot to ensure I have a paid parking place. No longer will I have to purchase tokens or a Transpass from the lady behind the plexiglass booth, sitting inside the warm “shed” by the tracks at each station.
Slowly, surely, the people who collected those quarters from the parking lot slots, and the people who sell those tokens and Transpasses, will be replaced by a machine. In a few years, the accountant who counts up the quarters for the month and calculates the company’s finance will be replaced by a machine. And in a few more years the paralegal who prepares the paperwork for the lawyer who represents the company’s interests will be replaced by a machine. Eventually even the lawyer may be replaced.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, those machines are increasingly going to be “smart" robots:
Robots are most certainly taking jobs. In the U.S., they’ve taken about half a million jobs already–mostly replacing assembly line workers with predictable machinery. But some economists agree that the next wave of AI will only accelerate this trend: Researchers estimate that by 2030, we could lose 800 million human jobs globally. By 2040, we could lose half. By 2060, we could lose them all.
Most of us don’t think too much about what happens to the people who used to work those jobs that have been slowly, steadily replaced for “convenience” purposes by the superswell digital economy. It just means a little less human interaction and service, like checking your own groceries at the self-service machines now ubiquitous in every major grocery chain. But the truth is that these changes are almost never instituted for our convenience, but for the purpose of squeezing out as much corporate profit as possible while avoiding the expense of paying real, messy, vulnerable human beings to do these tasks. Machines may need repair. What they don’t need is health care or “management."
The “promise” of automation has always held with it certain implicit assumptions, namely that those actually displaced by the inexorable march of technology are sacrificed for the greater good of efficiency. Perhaps the most pervasive assumption is that other, more “rewarding” jobs readily await these people, jobs they can miraculously access with just a little extra training. This reflexive rationalization in support of the automation of all tasks is so common that opposition to it is sometimes labelled as “Luddite,” conjuring up images of those bands of workers who demolished the machines that replaced them in the textile industries during the 19th century. In fact, polls consistently show Americans overwhelmingly favoring automation, until it comes for their own jobs.
Well the Luddites didn’t have to cope with Artificial Intelligence to exacerbate their income inequality problems:
Robots are likely to result in a further hollowing out of middle-class jobs, and the reason is something known as Moravec’s paradox. This was a discovery by AI experts in the 1980s that robots find the difficult things easy and the easy things difficult. Hans Moravec, one of the researchers, said: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”
A recent report by McKinsey and company concluded:
In the US alone, 39 to 73 million jobs may be eliminated by 2030, but about 20 million of those displaced workers may be able to easily transfer to other industries, according to the McKinsey report.
That leaves about 50 million people who won’t “easily transfer to other industries.” Without delving too deeply into Moravec’s paradox, what that implies is that in the near term, to the extent they don’t lose all of their employment potential, humans without exceptional skills are destined ultimately to be shunted by AI to lower-paying jobs “in which a small number of very rich people employ armies of poor people to cater for their every whim.” Or to put it in slightly more positive terms, without a guaranteed income for those who will soon be displaced, AI is a recipe for perpetual low-wage slavery among vast numbers of the U.S. population. In the longer term, as these robots get smarter and smarter, all bets are off.
Which brings us to a recent Gallup poll asking, well, how people felt about having their jobs taken away by robots deemed more intelligent than they are:
It asked whether a universal basic income should be established to help Americans who’ve lost their jobs to AI….
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Only 28% of Republicans polled support the idea, while 68% of Democrats do.
Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company who deserves credit for stepping back and seeing the implications of exactly what that means:
[I]t’s a sad snapshot of the state of human affairs, isn’t it? That even when people are replaced by a robotic intelligence beyond our wildest dreams, one political party will continue to insist it’s constituents’ own fault that their brains aren’t capable of computing calculus on the fly and their arms aren’t capable of lifting a car windshield. Perhaps they’ll just continue to promise they’ll bring all those extinct jobs back . . . one day.