What future for work when the robots come?

The advent of robots and artificial intelligence in everyday life reawakens fears and fantasies concerning our relationship with work and our fellow human beings: should we hope, fear, or dream of a world without work with the arrival of robots?

Fundamentally, the arrival of robots does not alter the basic observation: unemployment is a problem of matching up supply and demand and, all things being equal, unemployment should not exist as long as certain human needs remain unsatisfied, be they relative to health, education, housing, food, etc.

However, the nature of work will change and we will need to manage increasingly rapid and brutal transitions. It is this transition that we should be thinking about today, much more than the fantastical fear of the end of work which, I venture to say, will never come. "Since these mysteries surpass us, let’s pretend to be their organisers", if I may borrow the words of Cocteau (Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel).

1.    The end of work: a fear as old as the world itself

The phenomenon of fearing the end of work is not new. History is full of examples of technical advances arousing fears that there would be no more work.

For example, the Emperor Vespasian, wishing to rebuild the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, purchased the plans of a technique to cut the cost of transporting the columns. But he refused to use this technique, giving the following explanation: "You must let me feed my poor commons".

In the 18th and early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution gave rise to numerous attacks against machines, such as the revolts led by the Luddites or those of the Canut silk workers in Lyon, who suffered under competition from Jacquard looms.

This fear is that of technological unemployment, which Keynes identified as being "due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour". As a result, technical progress does not durably destroy employment, but creates a cyclical maladjustment of professions and skills.

Today this concern is revived by the advent of robots functioning with ‘artificial intelligence’: a new capacity for learning that combines the power of calculation and algorithms and the mass of data available, as well as auto-correction of errors and mimicry of a human entourage. 

Even if, in the long term, work will not be fundamentally threatened, it will be profoundly transformed.

2.    Work will continue to exist as long as there are unsatisfied needs. 

The fact that robots replace humans for certain tasks does not destroy jobs over time, but makes it possible to seek to satisfy needs that are not yet satisfied. Here is an example taken from our field of work: the introduction of automated border control gates in airports frees up the police for other assignments which artificial intelligence or robotisation cannot perform (public order, prevention of delinquency, etc.).

Above all, humans need to give meaning to their life by seeking a certain level of perfection and accomplishment, whether or not this includes a spiritual aspect. For example, below is an approximate translation of the notion of existence expressed by Georges Pompidou in a letter, dated 20 December 1930, addressed to his friend Robert Pujol[1].

" What needs to be done, I would sum up in three words: art, action, and love.

Art: by this I mean everything that is purely and specifically intellectual, which amounts to speculation, first and foremost. Then all that is literally and generally considered as art: painting, music, etc. After that a certain lifestyle: luxury for refinement, elegance, perfumes, jewellery, precious stones, women…. And finally, a certain way of looking at events which leads to one being thought of as an aesthete.

Action: this is, specifically, the exteriorisation of will. But here one must not lose sight of art. One should never do anything ungainly; one should create a type, a powerful personality, dominate, and impose oneself. That is why I wish for the revolution which would top up our faculties and take them to new heights.

Finally, love, which consists in loving and being loved. Being loved because it is gentle, beautiful, and useful in action".

Art, action, love: in truth, a robot cannot accomplish any of these three activities.

As Albert Jacquard said: "We can teach a computer to say ‘I love you’, but we cannot teach it to love".

3.    Work will not disappear. It will be profoundly transformed.

The arrival of robots does not imply the disappearance of work but rather its transformation, which will above all focus on the creation, improvement, maintenance, and control of robots as well as on innovation, for which disruptive and emotional capacities are major assets.

This development will not reduce work in highly-qualified jobs.

In some sectors, such as health, the human capacity for empathy is sometimes essential, and nurses’ jobs are less threatened by robotisation than those of radiologists for simple diagnoses based on medical imagery augmented by image recognition technology.

Along similar lines, I remember a friend of mine who is a frequent-traveller telling me how the concept of total robotisation at the new terminal of Singapore airport quickly had to be adjusted by hiring real-life staff to reduce the "dehumanised" aspect which passengers did not like.

4.    Rethink the distribution of value created by robots. Refuse the myth of universal income. 

For the major digital players (GAFA), a universal income would be a necessary consequence of value creation by robots, which would need to be redistributed to ensure a degree of social justice.

Personally, I fear that the introduction of a universal income would create an unequal society, like in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where a handful of people would govern the rest who would be reduced to receiving a subsistence income. Furthermore, I think that men and women find dignity in contributing to improving the world, in other words, in their work.

As Laurent Alexandre has remarked, this proposal of a universal income is a pretext to avoid reforming education. So, instead of creating a universal income, improving the educational system and continued training will be the major challenge of this new era, to allow people not simply to subsist but to find jobs. 

5.    The need to develop the educational system and lifelong learning.

Mankind’s new job will be to create and cooperate with machines, and to do what the latter are incapable of doing: managing social interactions and ensuring a form of artistic creativity. While the human lifespan is increasing, the cycle of changes in work is decreasing: nobody can predict what companies and administrations will need in 40 or 50 years’ time.

• Concerning initial learning

A completely transformed approach to schooling should teach new generations to:

• Manage the power that technologies give mankind; teach people to know themselves and to better manage their emotions and the basics of life in a digital society;
• Organise a world where the new forms of biological and artificial intelligence will co-exist.

We need to invent a school which provides the keys to "learning to learn"and "learning to innovate" rather than a know-how which will rapidly be surpassed. The essential prerequisite is a major effort to train teachers and increase their salaries.

• Concerning continued training

This is a challenge facing companies and social partners, which must be addressed as of now by increasing the time devoted to this type of training, with sector-specific training in technological tools, as well as training courses in the conception and design of artificial intelligence to boost employees’ adaptability and creativity throughout their careers.

Ultimately, there is little doubt that we are entering an uncertain and unstable period due to the acceleration of technical transformations. However, I prefer to see this as an opportunity: that we will all be "doomed to learn", throughout our lifetime, to maintain the capacity for disruption and emotion which artificial intelligence will never have. 

[1] Letter quoted in the book "Pour l'amour de l'art. Une autre histoire des Pompidou", by Alain Pompidou and César Armand, published by Plon.