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.
COVID-19 began to spread in the U.S. as many states prepared to hold primary elections.
Some states, fearing the spread of disease at crowded polling places, made emergency changes regarding how their citizens would exercise the right to vote, alarming those who feared democracy to be in danger. Other states proceeded according to plan, potentially putting voters’ lives at risk. How can we safeguard both public health and the health of our democracy during a global pandemic?
In the United States, state law determines voting methods. Ohio, plus 15 other states and Puerto Rico, all pushed back their primaries or switched to mail-in voting. From a health perspective this was wise, but did it undermine the rule of law?
In Ohio, a judge rejected the governor’s request to postpone the election, arguing that a late change in the election process would set a “terrible precedent.” In response, the governor used administrative powers to close the polls as a matter of public health. Later, the legislature enacted a law to authorize extended mail-in voting. If changing the rules of the game at the last moment sets a worrisome precedent, obtaining legislative permission for the change, albeit post facto, restored the rule of law.
On balance, I think Ohio’s leaders served the interests of democracy. Although any decision to change the date and means of an election will affect which voters actually cast a vote and who they favor at the moment of casting their vote, the change in rules did not appear to bias the results to favor any candidate or party. The Ohio decision balanced public health and voters’ access to the ballot box in a way that seems to have maximized both.
In contrast, Wisconsin voters had to choose either health or civic duty. Their governor’s effort to administratively postpone the election was challenged by the other party. The case arrived in the U.S. Supreme Court, where a narrow majority refused to give voters an additional week to cast absentee ballots — which could have allowed more Wisconsin residents to vote by mail rather than stand in line and risk contagion. The Court stood against last-minute changes to the electoral rules of the game, noting that “this Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”
Democracy only works if everyone knows the rules, follows the rules and believes the rules are fair. Last-minute changes undermine those conditions, so the Court’s precedent makes excellent sense — except that there is nothing ordinary about life in a pandemic. Ohio’s leaders recognized this, while Wisconsin stuck with the formal rules of the game, even though the conditions under which voters would want to go to their local polling place had changed dramatically.
Particularly in extraordinary times, we need intransigence in our commitment to democratic principles. In a polarized era, we need especially to make a priority of the principle that “my side will accept the results if we lose.” The COVID-19 pandemic, however, makes clear that we will need to adapt our methods of political contestation and participation. The danger lies in a temptation to be flexible in our commitments to democratic principles, or narrowly inflexible in our insistence on keeping old rules.
Powers is an expert in comparative politics who focuses on immigration, global poverty and Latin American politics.