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.
The simple, but disappointing, answer is that we cannot break down systemic racism within the judicial system until we have made significant inroads in eroding white supremacy itself.
White supremacy is defined as an ideology based on the belief that whites are superior to other races and is manifested through systems that maintain whites in superior positions.
The most cutting-edge research on implicit bias, including research conducted by Harvard’s Project Implicit, confirms that most Americans associate Blacks with crime and violence. Until fairly recently, these beliefs were held consciously and articulated publicly. Today, these beliefs are largely unconscious, but nevertheless play a significant role in decision-making processes. Accordingly, when actors within the criminal justice system make decisions, they act on these biases — even if they are not aware of them.
Bias in the criminal justice system begins with police officers; they decide who to stop and frisk or to arrest. Study after study demonstrates that police officers bring Blacks into the system with far greater frequency than whites. The process continues with prosecutors deciding whether to charge those arrested, take them to trial, or urge them to enter guilty pleas. Again, fewer whites are charged, compelled to enter guilty pleas, or sent to trial. At conviction, judges decide punishments. Blacks routinely receive harsher punishments than whites, up to and including the death penalty. Before judges can hand down sentences, juries must determine guilt or innocence. Juries convict black defendants at higher rates than white defendants.
A seemingly straightforward way of handling this problem of discretion is to eliminate it by crafting strict guidelines about what to do at each stage of the process. This has been tried since the 1970s and has failed, or has produced horrific unintended consequences. For example, mandatory-minimum sentencing was designed to ensure that all criminals convicted of particular crimes would receive similar punishments. That reform is responsible for today’s mass incarceration crisis.
In sum, we cannot make progress within the criminal justice system until we deal with white supremacy in our society as a whole. And the first step in that process is acknowledging that it is a problem, something we have been loathe to do.
Glenn McNair is a professor of history at Kenyon and former police officer and special agent within the U.S. Treasury Department.