Will Artificial Intelligence drive us out of work?

The first internal combustion engine built in the 1870s rendered took all of the horse population off the roads and rendered them obsolete as means of transport. This led a Nobel prize-winning economist, Wassily Leontief, to come to an unsettling conclusion. Leontief made one of the most infamous claims in modern economic thought. What technological progress had done to horses, he said, it would eventually do to human beings as well: drive us out of work. What cars and tractors were to them, he thought, computers and robots would be to us.

Today the same fear has the world in its folds. In the United States, 30 percent of workers now believe their jobs are likely to be replaced by robots and computers in their lifetime. In the UK, the same proportion thinks it could happen in the next twenty years.

This is not the first time that such fears have taken shape. In the past, many others have worried in similar ways about such doomsday prophesies for work only to be mistaken. Today is not the first time that automation anxiety has spread, nor did it first appear in the 19th century. In fact, ever since modern economic growth began, centuries ago, people have time and again been anxious from bouts of severe panic about being substituted by machines. Yet those fears, to the relief of people, have turned out to be misplaced. Despite an unceasing flow of technological advances over the years, there has always been enough demand for human capital. The permanent displacement of large pools of people has remained a far-fetched dystopia.

The cautious viewpoint says that we must take these sorts of fears with solemn seriousness – not always their substance, but certainly their spirit. Machines will not be all-pervasive in the future as we imagine them to be, but they will do more. And as they gradually, but perseveringly, take on additional tasks, human beings will be compelled to recede to a dwindling set of activities. It is improbable that every person will be able to do what remains to be done, and there is no reason to imagine there will be enough demand for it to employ all those who are indeed able to do it. An appropriate way of thinking about what this means is to dwell upon the effect that automation has already had on farming and manufacturing in many parts of the world.

However, if history is considered as a yardstick, the advancement of artificial intelligence is not a doomsday in the making, rather it is more like a quantum shift in the way the nature of work will change, here are a few broad-level affirmative changes that technology and AI will usher in-

1.??????Education - While technology makes a lot of work obsolete, it also creates room for new kinds of work. For example, while the advent of computers rendered a lot of manual jobs redundant, it spawned a huge industry that employs people by the millions. We must have the foresight and the courage to jump the bandwagon in the stage of inception and to be open to upskilling and adapting to the changing nature of work.

2.??????Policy level interventions- Several affirmative policy level interventions can help set things straight. The minimum wage can be redefined not only as per the sole factor of living standards but also according to the criticality of the work done by the people. There are some hard-to-automate roles like Teachers and Caregivers, who contribute much more in social value without commensurate compensation in economic value. There can be policy-level changes in the number of work hours or work days thus impacting the quality of life positively.

3.??????Meaning and Purpose- In a world with less work, we will be able to create a set of tools to influence our free time, too. Those can

include leisure policies, designed to help people spend their time in purposeful ways; opportunities for people who still want to ‘work’ even if not for a wage; and requirements that people contribute to society, in return for the support that society provides.

To conclude- In the next hundred years, technological evolution will render us more affluent than ever before. Yet that development will also take us towards a world with reduced and altered work modalities. The economic problem that gripped our ancestors, that of making the economic pie large enough for everyone to live on, will recede, and three new problems will emerge to take its place. First, is the problem of inequality, of working out how to share this economic prosperity with everyone in society. Although we cannot know exactly how long it will take to arrive at a world with less work for human beings to do, there are clear signs that we are on our way there. The challenges of inequality, power, and meaning are not hidden in the distance, out of sight in the remote future. They have already begun to manifest, to trouble, and test our old institutions and archaic ways of life. It is up to us how we adopt and adapt in the future.

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Ref- A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond Book by Daniel Susskind