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.
Unmitigated climate change poses an existential threat to our way of life.
A major economic study projects a long-term 20 percent reduction in global gross domestic product from climate change. To avoid such unprecedented declines, we must reduce our greenhouse emissions in the U.S. by 80 percent by 2050. This goal is realistic, but a major undertaking that requires deliberate action.
Numerous economic models demonstrate that transitioning to renewable energy is likely to result in a net economic gain for our society. That does not mean that every individual will benefit, nor that the transition with be without pain, but it does mean that the transition is likely to result in more jobs and a more efficient and resilient electricity system. A recent study by the Risky Business Project provides a framework for an approach that is both technically and economically feasible. It is based on three principal transitions: shifting from fossil fuels to electricity, generating electricity from low- and zero-carbon sources and using all energy more efficiently.
The shift from fossil fuels to electricity includes the gradual adoption of electric vehicles, electric and geothermal heat pumps, and electricity in industrial processes. The shift to renewable electricity production requires a rapid transition to zero-carbon sources, like wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear, along with an expansion of energy-storage technologies and a redesigned grid to reduce the variability impacts of wind and solar. The potential for increased efficiency in energy use is significant, as we lose about half of all electricity generated in the U.S. to system losses. A redesigned distributed generation grid could dramatically reduce those losses.
The cost of this particular plan would be around $320 billion a year from 2020 to 2050, but the returns over the life of the transition would be substantially larger and would continue indefinitely. The savings would start at around $65 billion a year in the 2020s, increasing to over $700 billion a year in the 2040s. Around 1 million additional jobs would be created during the 30-year transition, with many of the largest gains being in the domestic construction and utilities sectors. While other approaches may offer greater or fewer costs or benefits, the important point is that the renewable energy transition can be a win-win proposition for our economy.