Can an AI do your job?
Work is a central human activity. In all cultures it is the basis for the economy, and thus at the core of social structure. It plays a major part in the structuring of people’s lives, in identity formation, life experience and relationships.
In modern capitalist economies, work is characterized by a highly complex and diverse division of labor, which is distributed globally. The last few decades – beginning with the economic reforms of the 1970s – has seen a fast development towards increasing specialization and flexibility of companies, and also a growing rift between those people who produce great economic value, and those who have much less to offer to the market.
This rift is made wider by the technological developments that have taken place in the same period. Manual labor has been gradually replaced by automated machinery already for a long time. And now, increasingly, even relatively complicated mental work is being replaced by automation in the form of AI. (See more about this under The Technologies.)
As of right now, it is very hard to predict exactly what the future developments are going to be like. Predictions range from humans being almost entirely replaced by AI, to no humans being replaced because new kinds of jobs will emerge as technology improves. Moderate predictions land somewhere in the middle.1 It seems highly likely that a large number of jobs which have been considered somewhat advanced – like accountant, paralegal and insurance clerk – will be replaced by AI. Other jobs, especially ones which require social skills and creativity, will be harder for AI to replace, and will thus most likely be around longer.
These are the human work tasks of the 21st century: Complex social and creative tasks, such as high-quality personal services, project development and existential guidance.
As has been hinted above, the central conflict is the one between human capabilities and AI capabilities. Given that human capabilities are set, while AI is constantly improving, the solution to the problem seems to be to mitigate the potentially negative effects of replacing humans on the job market.2
Many such solutions center around a sort of expansion of the social support systems that are already in place in most developed countries. The perhaps most well-known suggestion is that of Universal Basic Income (UBI). This would be the practice of placing taxes on the individuals and companies that own the new AI and robotics, and then hand this out as income to the majority of people, who have been rendered unemployed by technological advances. As has been pointed out by historian Yuval Noah Harari, this would in fact be the Communist vision come to life without violent revolution.
It might however be objected that this is too good to be true. Unemployment is today one sure way towards disintegrating life satisfaction. How would human beings find meaning – or, if you like, distraction – in a world without work? Harari, and also physicist Max Tegmark, are optimistic on this point.
Harari notes the example of utra-orthodox Jews in Israel, who do no work and yet report highest scores of life satisfaction in all the country.
Tegmark refers to studies in positive psychology, which have shown that work has been found to provide a number of positive effects (like a social network, a healthy lifestyle, respect and self-confidence, and a sense of meaning) and notes that all of these effects can, in principle, be achieved outside of work as well. He gives as examples sports, hobbies, studies, and social interaction with family, friends, teams, clubs, social groups, schools, religious and humanist organizations, political movements and other institutions. Quite a long list!
(1) Leaving out the most extreme predictions, in a report on the future of work presented to the European Commission in May 2019, titled “The Future of Work? Work of the Future!”, Michel Servoz referred to five studies conducted between 2013 and 2018 according to which between 14 % and 47 % of jobs would disappear due to automation, after potential job creation effects had been taken into account.
(2) Under The Technologies, we explore an alternative option: Improving humans through the use of AI and biotech. Of course, the two solutions need not be mutually exclusive.
Leisure Time
To be sure, we do not seem to have any shortage of leisure time activities. Sports, hiking, cooking, drawing, Pessoan daydreaming, reading, writing, thinking, and meeting with people in the physical world, just to name a few, are activities that generally take place during leisure time and are enjoyed by billions.
In the last twenty years, all of this activity has been deeply influenced by the emergence of the internet and social media. No matter what your interests in the real world are, going online (even very briefly, just to look something up) will have drastic implications. The amount of knowledge and inspiration available is mind-boggling. Finding like-minded people is just one click away.
But as this transformation of leisure time has progressed, a market for data has emerged. Information about users, and the use of this data for changing behaviors in the real world (e.g. for buying certain products or voting a certain way), has become one of the most salient features of the first decades of our century. At the core, we once again find the conflict between human capabilities – largely instinctual and easily manipulated on the affective level, as it turns out – and the capabilities of AI, improving as the amount of collected data grows.
We do not yet have a very deep understanding of what the psychological consequences of living highly virtual and digitalized lives are. Certain studies have suggested that new generations of pre-teens and teens have worse mental health than previous generations did, and that this might have some connection with social media use. Without a doubt, constantly interacting with a network of billions of people and trillions of bits of information puts a strain on a species of social information gatherers like ourselves. It may be that we need to develop new cultural strategies for how to optimally interact with the technology, rather than leave it to the algorithms of large tech companies to program our behavior for us.
As we move further into this century’s 20s, the issue of surveillance and control through the use of AI is a major one. At the time of writing this, no straightforward solutions appear available. To be sure, the states of the world are taking different approaches. The issue relates to the classic conflict between freedom and security. On the one hand, giving up freedom might make us more secure. But on the other hand, it puts us at the mercy of whoever is providing security.
And the problem runs deeper than that. As we mentioned above, AI allows for influencing the behavior of individuals. This means that the very foundation of liberal democracy – the idea that the will of the single individual (whatever that is) should be considered as valuable in itself, and equal to the will of everyone else – is weakened considerably.
The implications for everyday life of the new technology are far-reaching. Not least, as has been suggested by sociologist Manuel Castells, a transformation of our perception of space and time appears to have taken place.
Places are nowadays rarely significant on account of what they look like to the naked eye, or their relative geographical position. Rather, what is significant about a place is how it relates to global flows of information and capital. What cannot be communicated through a Facebook post may still feel meaningful, but it will not inform your friends and acquaintances of your current status the way a picture or a few lines of text will. London’s business district has infinitely more in common with the business districts of Paris, Tokyo or the Pearl River Delta-megapolis than with the countryside just outside it.
Time used to be something we experienced as everyday events taking seconds, minutes, days, months or years to unfold. Nowadays, the same events may happen more or less instantaneously. Want to talk to someone who is not around? They will have your text in their phone instantly. Want to see what this new housing project will look like once it is done? Step inside the immersive simulation. Other events happen so as to perturb clock-time and biological time in similar ways. Don’t want to become pregnant at 20, but still have sex? Contraceptives are the way to go. Still want to become pregnant at 45? Assisted conception is your friend.
Not least, our perception of reality itself is being transformed by the new technology. Going online, we potentially come in contact with every cultural expression there is. This can be a major challenge for us to assimilate to, since our sense of identity is tied up with a much more limited set of cultural expressions. As our lives mingle with the Net in this way, everything takes on a multiplicity of new dimensions.
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Sources for the above:
Official documents
EU Commission. Communications COM(2016) 381, COM(2018) 237, COM(2018) 795, COM(2019) 168, COM(2020) 64, COM(2020) 65 White Paper, COM(2021) 118, COM(2021) 205; Expert reports “The Future of Work? Work of the Future!” (2019), AIHLEG “Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI” (2019)
EU Parliament. Draft report 2015/2103 (INL), Res 2015/2103 (INL), Res 2020/20 -12, -14 and -15 (INL)
Literature
Castells, Manuel. Communication Power (2nd ed, Oxford University Press 2013)
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age Trilogy I: The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed, Wiley-Blackwell 2010)
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age Trilogy II: The Power of Identity (2nd ed, Wiley-Blackwell 2010)
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age Trilogy III: End of Millenium (2nd ed, Wiley-Blackwell 2010)
Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Spiegel and Grau 2018)
Tegmark, Max. Life 3.0 (Knopf 2017)
Online resources (visited April 2021)
Artificial Intelligence News. artificialintelligence-news.com
MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/
State of AI Conference. https://www.stateof.ai/
The Social Dilemma. thesocialdilemma.com
Wikipedia. Entries on “Artificial intelligence”, “Social media”.
RADIUS 