Social Impact of Automation and Universal Basic Income
Automation has changed many industries and lifestyles of people exponentially in the last few decades. Common consumer goods such as mobile phones will be a luxury item if there was no automation involved and people would have to wait for months or years until they can buy a car after placing the order and only a few people will able to afford them.
Generally, automation made production more efficient, which enabled production cheap and quick without worrying about human errors. In the service sector also, implementations such as accounting software, self-help sections, and intelligent chatbots limited human involvement. In agriculture also, the production has increased because of the automation. Even the automation has made ourselves to enjoy the luxury, only the kings were able to experience about a century ago, there is a social impact associated with. Let’s look into the path to the Automation and AI before we discuss the social impact of the automation.
Before, ten thousand years ago the human race had survived by hunting and gathering. People only wanted to cover their basic needs such as food, water, and shelter. They spent most of the time of the day for hunting and searching for food. Around 7000 to 10000 years ago, people identified plants that yield more crops and grew them where it can be accessed more easily and domesticated animals with more meat for food. It was the beginning of agriculture. Humans had freed up the time they spent on hunting and gathering and focused on making their lives better.
People used to live in small clusters of people called “Villages” and people exchanged their expertise either with a product or a service to make a living. Hence the “division of labor” started. With the division of labor, most of them mastered, skills and had their lives depend on it, and it made society more efficient.
Beginning of Automation
Human, gradually moved to machinery to make their task easier and enhance the amount they produce. Moving to machinery was boomed in the 18th and 19th centuries with the “Industrial Revolution”.People had more jobs, different types of jobs because of this. Production capacity had increased and produced at a lower cost than before. People had money and goods were cheaper, therefore economy growth was rapidly increasing. Organizations were competing with each other to offer cheaper and quality products and services to market and earn more profit.
In order to produce a product at a lower cost, the cost of components of it should be minimized and labor was one of them. In order to reduce the cost of labor Automation was introduced to the industries. According to Prof. Mikell Groover (Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Lehigh University, USA)
Automation, or Labor-saving technology is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimal human assistance.
Evolution of AI
This transformation of automation pioneered, recent Industrial revolution which is known as “Industry 4.0”. Modern automation applications can learn more complex cognitive tasks, which were performed by humans before, because of Artificial Intelligence. In other words, there is more possibility to substitute someone’s job with Artificial Intelligence. In order to stay in employment, employees have to constantly upskill themselves. However, the adaptability of AI is very much high compared to human adaptability with a new skill. For example, AI AlphaGo defeating 18-time world champion Lee Sedol of Go; Ancient complex Chinese board game in 2016.
Go is a very complex game, it has more possible combinations than estimated no of atoms in entire universe.
Free Money?
About a decade ago, Natural Language processing is a challenging task, and most of the time, Natural Language Processing applications needed human intervention for better results. However, now, AI is not only able to understand the words a person saying also, has the ability to understand the emotion. Tasks like transcription made easier because of AI. On the other hand, a person who did transcription as a job now replaced with a more efficient machine which can do their jobs really cheaper. With the speed of the current improvement of AI, some futurists like Raymond Kurzweil estimate AI to have human-level intelligence(Technological Singularity) around the year 2045. What happens next?
There is a limit for human adaptability with changing technologies and also adaptability differs from person to person. This will cause a scary thought of running out of jobs for humans to do in the future. Then, how can we make a living? Actually, You can make a living by doing “Nothing” at all with Universal Basic Income. (UBI)
Universal Basic Income is unconditional,non-withdrawable income paid to every individual of a country without respecting their other socio-economic status.
“No matter what your income is you will receive, free money from the Government”
For example, if a government of a country decides to pay $1000 a month for every individual, every citizen of the country will receive that amount and they can spend it on anything legal that they wish for. Also, you can do your job for an extra income. So, will it cause economic hardship for the government? Apparently not, the government will raise money direct taxation from the companies who are highly autonomous. Also, with the increased cash flow, indirect taxation income will be increased.
Practicality
There were several trials have done in Europe, the USA, Canada, and also in India. The amount an individual receives and criteria were different from program to program. From those studies, it has been observed that living standards have increased and most of the money has spent on essential expenses and education. Also, 2020 democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang emphasized Universal Basic Income in his campaign called “Freedom Dividend”, where every American adult will get $1000 a month irrespective of their income. Even though he suspended his campaign in early 2020, this can be identified as a significant milestone, in the global political context, for UBI as a response to job displacement by automation.
The Future
It is now visible that automation is adopting faster than humans can, in every work environment. Hence, there are two options as a human; either to adopt faster or find an alternative solution. Currently, most of the people may be selected as the first option, since currently, there are many more fields where AI is not up to same level as humans. These areas will get limited day by day. Universal Basic Income is just one solution to this problem. The number of solutions for this problem is only limited by the thinking capacity of humans or AI ;). In order to survive in the future, we must evaluate our options for tomorrow, today.
In the next article let’s discuss how the economy will work with UBI.
See You Again :)
