United Nations: What to do when robots take our jobs
The UN has set up a centre to study the potential impacts of robotics and AI. Here are some of the major ideas they’ll be considering when it comes to work
Robots and automation are coming for our jobs. What are we going to do about it? The automation revolution we’ve heard so much about could disrupt society and “cause instability”, according to Irakli Beridze, senior strategic advisor at the UN’s Crime and Justice Research Institute, which has just opened a new Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
That global destabilisation will happen “if societies do not adapt quickly enough”, Beridze told local newspapers at the centre’s launch.
Good thing that we’ve had so much warning, then, as tech leaders can’t stop going on about the risks of automation, even as they push the tech forward. Tesla’s Elon Musk and DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman were just two signatories of an open letter this August calling for the UN to take action on the dangers of autonomous weapons – intriguing as both men run firms developing AI technologies.
With its new research centre, the UN hopes to come up with practical measures to address the challenges of robots, automation and AI, with Beridze saying: “We want to start concrete projects – we will not be a talking club.”
There has already been plenty of talk on one area of robotics and automation that is sure to cause problems: our jobs. Predictions suggest a third of existing jobs will disappear in the next few decades, eaten away by software bots and robotic automation. New work will pop up in its place – someone needs to program the robots after all, although that may require retraining – but there are concerns that there won’t be enough employment to go around, leaving us broke with nothing to do. A series of economic policies aim to address the challenge, but it’s unclear if any will suffice.
“It’s nice to throw out these ideas, but it’s hard to figure out how they would be implemented,” said Wendell Wallach, professor at Yale University and author of 2015’s A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond our Control. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be implemented.”
Universal basic income
While not having to show up for work on a Monday morning because a robot replacement is doing the job for you certainly has its appeal, it becomes problematic if we’re not paid. One frequently mooted solution is universal basic income (UBI). Under this plan, we would all be paid a minimum salary by the government to keep us fed and sheltered and buying things to prop up the economy, regardless of the work we did. Some trials are already running. In Finland, 2,000 participants receive €560 a month with no requirement to look for work or reduction if they do get a job. Early reports suggest it’s helped reduce stress and encouraged people into
part-time or lower-paid work, but critics say it’s unaffordable.
“If we are going to see widespread unemployment because of tech advances, then you need to find some way of distributing goods and services – largely capital – if you want people to have some degree of freedom in terms of how they use those goods and services,” said Wallach.
Wallach notes that there’s more to work than just money, with people taking their identity and finding fulfilment from work, so he suggests we find something better to do with our spare time. “For example, for that basic income people are asked to create their own jobs, do their own tasks that they believe will contribute to the overall well-being of the society,” he said. “You could imagine a bunch of actors joining together and taking Shakespeare into schools.”
Cultural changes could help, too. “We could accept that work is a shorter part of our life than it was in the past,” explained MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber, and have more leisure time by retiring early or working fewer days. “But that’s going to involve a big cultural shift.”
Robot taxes
One criticism of shorter work weeks and UBI is paying for it all. Much of our public services and welfare protections are paid for by income tax – so if fewer of us are working, the government is raking in less to pay for the unemployment insurance.
There are a few possible solutions. The first is simply to raise corporate taxes. The argument is companies will be making more profit by not having to pay all our salaries, and that’s especially true of the Silicon Valley giants making robots and automation software that replaces us.
Not all businesses will benefit from automation and robotics evenly, so luminaries such as Bill Gates have suggested taxing robot workers – but even that could create imbalance. “What if a company using robots creates more jobs than one without?” noted Gruber. One way of dealing with the problem of robots extracting wealth from workers and handing it to Silicon Valley firms is making sure we own the machinery or automation software, so we benefit from it too.
Not so fast
Considering such ideas is a wise move in case the automation revolution does come to pass, but not all are convinced it will – or should. Andrew Feenberg, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology at Simon Fraser University, said much of what is currently claimed is “technically implausible”, saying technology is good at hype, but that it “doesn’t predict the future”.
That said, Feenberg doesn’t question that robotics and AI will easily replace simple tasks – instead, his doubts centre on more complicated work. “What’s unusual about the intelligence of human beings… is we can do so many things, we have a way of functioning that isn’t modelled by machines,” he said.
He stressed some jobs should be replaced because they’re dangerous or boring, something the Western world has long be doing by exporting work. “To have a machine that does repetitive welds on auto bodies faster and better than human welders may be a good thing rather than a bad thing, because the welder’s job is doing the same physical gesture over and over and over all day long,” he said. “It’s a mechanical performance by a human.”
But other jobs shouldn’t be handed over to machines and their overlords. Jobs that include human interaction should be left alone, Feenberg said, pointing to medical treatments and education in particular. “I think this is wrong, and I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t try and squeeze people into a box, [to] devalue and redefine whatever profession so that it can be done by a machine… it may be impoverished or incompetent by our current standards, but they’ll say this is all we can afford.”
And that could be what sparks resistance from people – from us wanting to interact with other humans, rather than just fear for our jobs. Either way, the UN has plenty on its plate to keep an eye on.