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: CHRIS PALUDI ’20 | Political Science Major from Los Angeles
Just completed a final exam on a similar question in my “International Relations” class, where we talked extensively about this issue. Though we didn’t achieve world peace in a semester, the class did shed some light on why the largest nations in the world have enjoyed a long period of peace and prosperity after World War II, but why the world is, in some ways, a much less stable place than it was 20 years ago.
The world is a dangerous place, and countries’ first priority in their international relations is their own security. With no one to protect them, they have to protect themselves, and to do so, they arm themselves. If everyone is arming themselves, there is no way to really know whether or not someone with the ability to hurt you is simply protecting themselves or is preparing to attack. The only way to be safe is to make sure you’re the strongest one around. If you’re thinking, “That sounds like an arms race,” well, you’d be right. That’s why most countries agree on rules that help everybody feel safer.
Ever since World War II, the U.S. has been a “global policeman” that enforces these rules. To prevent the insecurity that makes the international system so dangerous, the U.S. makes it clear that we're ready to use our power to stand up for our allies if they're attacked. Since the 1940s, America has accumulated binding promises to protect almost 70 countries across the globe, from NATO nations to Japan and South Korea. And since the U.S. is not a country others have wanted to mess with, things have been pretty peaceful from a historical perspective.
The world also has a neighborhood watch in the United Nations, which helps countries talk things out as much as possible. Countries also trade more today than ever before, and are pretty interdependent in ways that have made peace and prosperity not only possible but probable. That wasn’t something you could count on for most of history. And when that situation gets more dicey, like today, countries flex their muscles in nonviolent ways to maintain the status quo. We’ve found that smart, strong sanctions and even public pressure can often prove really useful to changing behaviors.
Unfortunately, humans haven’t figured out how to simply negotiate our way out of every disagreement. We may never will. Acknowledging this ugly reality, we should all be more empathetic and seek to understand and respect other states and other cultures. Doing so may help prevent misunderstandings and adversarial attitudes that lead to violence where it need not arise.