by Sarah Firisen
Watch this video. No, I mean, right now, go and watch this video, I’ll wait. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, even if you think it’s unnecessary scaremongering, you should still find it thought provoking and at least a little scary (most people find it terrifying), and if you don't, then you’re really not paying attention. If you can’t be bothered to watch it, the basic premise is that we are very very quickly, far quicker than most of us realize, moving towards a world with so much automation that “Humans need not apply” for most jobs. That we are moving towards a very near-term future where humans, like horses in the past, aren’t just unemployed, they’re unemployable.
Bill Gates famously wrote, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction." It might be tempting to brush off predictions of a future without human work. And indeed, today, the likelihood of such a future does depends who you ask; the US government says not to worry (and this was before the current science denying administration), the UK government is less convinced.
By some predictions, more than half the human race could be unemployed, and more importantly unemployable, by as early as 2045. Uber recently bought Otto, an autonomous truck company. In October 2016 they made their first delivery, 50,000 beers. In the US alone there are 3.5 million truck drivers. That’s a lot of jobs and a lot of people to find additional employment for, but it’s not half the human race by any standards – even though transportation is the largest employment category in the world. Nevertheless, maybe it’s just, as the UK Science and Technology Committee says, that “Human beings must develop new skills to compete in a world where artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent”. This is hardly a new problem; the 19th century Luddites were a group of English workers who destroyed machinery, particularly in the mills, because they feared it would take their livelihood away from them. They were right, it did, but those weren’t great jobs. Mill work was strenuous, poorly paid labor that often led to chronic, sometimes fatal illnesses. The industrial revolution eventually significantly increased the standard of living for the general population.
The prediction of Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers is that "AI will grow the economy instead of take jobs away. While some jobs may disappear, AI will create new jobs and consumer demand for new products and services”. But while there may be some truth to that, this isn’t like the Victorian industrial revolution, this is different, both in scale and in the kinds of jobs that are already being automated.