Why You Should Care About Technological Unemployment

Last month I witnessed workers and passengers clash at Victoria station over the latest Southern Rail strike. The debate over driver only trains may seem relatively petty, but it is a sub plot to one of the most important debates in our life times.

A lot has been written about technological unemployment, especially in the last two years as artificial intelligence becomes part of our everyday lives. In 2015 Deloitte and Oxford released a study that claimed 800,000 jobs had been lost to automation since 2001 and that 1/3 of all jobs (11m) were set to disappear in the next decade.

The impact of the technological singularity is difficult to predict. It could make the world a better place. It could make it worse. The difference will probably be decided by how we react and protect our society from the relentless technological shift.

Whenever the issue of tech unemployment is raised there are always sceptics. These are four common arguments as to why we shouldn't worry:

1. “it won’t happen for decades”

2. “it wont affect my job”

3. “new jobs will be created”

4. “we won’t need jobs anyway”

I personally don’t believe we can afford to be complacent on this issue. Unchallenged it potentially has the power to wreak havoc on a scale unseen since the industrial revolution. Here's why I believe the above arguments are misguided and complacent.

1. Argument one: “it won’t happen for decades”

This is the procrastinator’s argument. It’s the person who says “we have time” when the fire alarm goes off without realising the building is already ablaze. Technological unemployment is not something that will happen - it has happened. It would be naïve to think technology is not contributing on at least some level to the record-level unemployment in the Eurozone.

Not only has it started but the speed of change is truly frightening.  Frederico Pistono in his book Robots Will Take Your Job But That’s Ok flags the exponential growth of technology and what this means. The below chart shows the impact the Industrial Revolution had on the world in just 200 years. Considering technology is developing so much faster than industrial engineering, the idea that children born today won’t be affected by this technological age is inconceivable.  

The impact of the industrial revolution on human population and social development

Murray Shanahan and Ray Kurzweil may have raised eyebrows when they predicted that technology will outsmart us, or at least render us obsolete potentially by 2045, but even so it is clear the one thing we don’t have when addressing this problem is time.

2. Argument two: “it wont affect my job”

If you think that the second machine age will only impact those working in a factory line then you’re mistaking it for the first. Transport is currently in the crosshairs with driverless cars and trains a genuine possibility, but this is just the beginning. Richard and Daniel Susskind make this point incredibly clearly in their book The Future of The Professions. They argue that we are ‘on the brink of a period of fundamental and irreversible change’ and observe that lawyers, doctors and accountants are already losing business through services like eBay online dispute, WebMD and online tax calculators respectively. These are only going to get smarter. As I heard Pistono say in a debate on this subject – “what happens when a machine can do everything better than you?”. Of course there are intricacies of irrational human genius, which will never be replicated. Artists, inventors, creatives may survive if they are good enough but only a tiny fraction of these will be able to compete with where AI can get to. 

3. Argument three: “new jobs will be created”

One of the most common reposts to technological unemployment is that new jobs will be created – “who will build and design the robots?”. Apart from the fact that robots can and already are building other robots, this argument appears to have some logic to it. After all, farmers survived the industrial revolution, as hunters did the agricultural revolution. Those transitions however were not plain sailing. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out the industrial revolution led to mass unemployment, displacement, disease, over-population, terrible working conditions and child labour. It took more than a century for worker’s rights and living conditions to improve.

The industrial revolution led to appalling living and woking conditions for millions

What makes this second machine age different is the speed it’s happening and the scale of the transition. Of course new jobs will be created but those jobs are going to be incredibly specialised. Q. “who will build the robots?” A. “Not the 55yr old truck driver”. In the industrial revolution farm hands became factory workers. The jobs were different, but that change was manageable. You could potentially retrain in a few months, even weeks, and the pace of the transition meant that was possible. Let’s say driverless cars are a reality in 15 years time. Even if millions of taxi drivers started retraining today, it may not be enough time to requalify into a preserved technological profession. Add to that the fact that it won’t be just one profession seeking new survival but hundreds, and the picture becomes a lot more gloomy.

How will millions of professional drivers retrain if driverless vehicles become standardised? 

4. Argument four: Utopia not dystopia

The final argument is more of a solution. Futurists and socialists including Pistono and Elon Musk see a world where all the menial tasks can be done by robots and we will “have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,” as Musk put it in an interview with CNBC. The idea that robots will do all the work and we can sit back and relax simply isn’t true. A study by Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels on 14 separate industries showed that use of robots did not reduce toil (hours worked), only the total number of jobs available.

Pistono goes even further than Musk, talking about a socialist society where we don’t need jobs, materialism or consumerism but only open source sharing which will lead to self-sustainability.  Whilst these arguments sound idyllic nothing in our history suggests human society could operate in a system like this. Jobs are important, not just to survive but to provide identity, self-worth and standing in structured social communities. Without them we’ll find we have far more problems than just economic ones.

What can be done?

I don’t believe technological unemployment will be an apocalyptic event that brings down the world as we know it, but the industrial revolution shows that life certainly get worse before it gets better. Our equivalent of child labour and an exploited workforce could be an entire generation left behind, unable to contribute, unable to offer value or earn. “Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead’ (Brynjolfsson & McAfee).

There is another society that faced a similar challenge. Around 50BC ancient Rome had a huge problem with slave labour. There was such an influx of slaves after massive empire expansion that paid labourers were left penniless and starving. The mobs and rioting that ensued is one of the factors that brought down the republic itself and led to probably the most famous, bloody and tumultuous 30 years of politics ever seen. 

Julius Caesar tried to bring in legislation to control the balance of slave and paid labour 

It feels like the answer for us, as indeed it was in Rome, lies in legislation. We may get to the point where the only reason people have jobs is because we choose for them to have them. If we only make decisions driven by a capitalist drive for efficiency we risk bringing down our own society. The French theorist and Marxist philosopher Guy DeBord made this point way back in 1967 – “the same technical infrastructure that is capable of abolishing labor must at the same time preserve labor”.

Bill Gates somewhat surprisingly agrees explaining why a tax on automation is so important “You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed. Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

I do not believe that singularity will ever cause humans to be destroyed or made redundant. But I do believe that technological unemployment will be one of the biggest challenges we face in our lives, and certainly our children’s lifetimes. History tells us that whilst we may get to a better and balanced place, any societal transformation has its victims. In Rome it was farm labourers cut out by slaves, in 19C Europe factory workers made redundant by machines, today it will be an entire generation unless we act now and carefully control that change. We have the power to avert this disaster. As Brynjolfsson and McAfee state “The challenges of the digital revolution can be met, but first we have to be clear on what they are. It’s important to discuss the likely negative consequences of the second machine age and start a dialogue about how to mitigate them—we are confident that they’re not insurmountable”.

That’s why in the next inevitable transport strike maybe you should side with those on the other side of the picket fence.