A: KATHERINE ELKINS | Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities JON CHUN | Visiting Instructor of Humanities, Affiliated Scholar in Scientific Computing
For most of human history, automation has dramatically increased our material comfort, wealth and well-being, freeing humans from the “3 Ds” of “dull, dirty and dangerous” work while providing new and more stimulating work opportunities. The majority of us believe our jobs will remain immune, and that automation will augment rather than replace human labor.
But recently, anxiety about automation has increased. Automation is suspected of playing a role in the stagnant wage growth and underemployment that has plagued developed economies for the past half century. Artificial Intelligence also is demonstrating the potential to automate almost every human activity.
The newest wave of AI-powered automation is less about automating simple physical labor and more about empowering automation with human-like perception, communication and cognition. Studies have found that up to half of existing jobs are at risk for automation within two decades, and it’s possible AI will outperform humans in all work tasks within 45 years.
Still, some “dull and dirty” jobs pose real challenges to automation. Ironically, AI turns out to be better at manipulating abstract symbols, exploring innovative designs, and sensing human emotions than cleaning toilets. Imagine a future dystopia in which we clean toilets while AI writes symphonies, serializes TV shows and crunches numbers to make life’s important decisions.
What can we do as a society if many of us cannot compete with automation for traditional jobs and new job creation fails to keep pace? Small scale experiments in Universal Basic Income are testing it as a viable alternative to a work-based economy. Taxing robots in proportion to the human labor they replace may preserve government revenue and slow its adoption. Congress has banned self-driving trucks, and human oversight is mandated for data-driven criminal sentencing and medical diagnosis.
Still, there remains the question as to how individuals will reimagine their purpose and identity without work. Automation may force us to rethink the fundamental premises of our economy, laws and ethics as it accelerates wealth concentration, creates vast power imbalances and swiftly outmaneuvers any regulations designed to control it.
We all need to ask and answer these big questions to ensure that an automated world is still one we wish to inhabit. Only in doing so can we determine how to maintain a humanist world in the face of an increasing post-humanist onslaught.
Scientists have been manipulating DNA for decades, but early genetic-manipulation techniques were slow, expensive and geared to individual species.
Enter CRISPR — a fast, cheap and flexible way to make precise changes in any cell’s DNA.
CRISPR’s enormous promise has both scientists and investors aggressively seeking new therapeutic applications, including altering a gene within retinal cells to restore sight to patients with a rare cause of heritable blindness.
A more ambitious goal is to modify the “germ line,” the cells that give rise to sperm and egg, thereby creating genetic alterations that could be passed on to a patient’s children. The hope would be to eliminate inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy or Huntington’s disease. Edits in the human germ line must be made on in-vitro-fertilized human embryos. And that’s where serious concerns arise.
First, CRISPR technology is not yet safe enough for medical use in human embryos. In early attempts to perform CRISPR edits in an embryo, scientists based in China detected unanticipated changes at multiple sites in the genome, which might have caused birth defects or diseases if the embryo had been brought to term. Recent attempts in an American lab were more encouraging, but improved accuracy resulted from unexpected and poorly understood biochemical mechanisms.
While some medical scientists argue that it’s morally wrong to withhold the cure to a genetic disease, the alteration of the human genome raises profound ethical questions. What if we used technology to select specific traits in offspring — height, skin color or intelligence? How would widespread genome editing affect the population genetics of our species in the future? If a sophisticated experimental technique like CRISPR is available only to the rich, could it exacerbate and entrench economic inequality at the biological level?
Issues such as these cry out for international consensus. For now, the laws of many Western European countries and the policies of American research agencies establish a moratorium on genetic manipulation of the human germ line. But a panel from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report exploring the way forward for human gene therapy. Inaction by society is not an option. It is crucial that the pace of policymaking match the inevitably rapid advancement of genome-editing technology.