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.
A: GEORGE GOLDMAN '20 | History Major from Boston
This question reminds me of a history class I took called “Modern History of the Middle East.” In the class, we learned about the recent wave of protests and revolutions (the Arab Spring) that took place from 2010 to 2012 throughout the Middle East in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. We discussed how protests often happen in cycles; in other words, they come about as a part of a larger historical pattern in which revolts of collective action against the government rise, fall, and make way for the next cycle to continue the trend.
For instance, the Young Turks Revolution of 1908, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, and the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 each were a part of a distinct protest cycle in which the people rose up against the government. However, history did not completely repeat itself in each case. The methods and eventual outcomes of the protests all were very different.
American writer Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” After taking “History of the Modern Middle East,” I learned how the Arab Spring protests were not a complete repeat of history, but instead a sort of rhyme with history. For sure, ideas, goals and traditions continued from one protest cycle to the next, but the kinds of people protesting and the results of the protests were often very different. As a history major myself, I have learned that your question is one that has kept many a historian busy.