The growing backlash to elite-focused automation
Workers will oppose automation that makes them poorer
Automation is often framed as a liberatory force: once robots can do more of the work currently done by humans, workers will be free to work fewer hours — or not at all — and put more time into the pursuits and hobbies they’re more passionate about. The problem, however, is that this future isn’t guaranteed; automation could bring massive benefits for the whole of the population, but the gains could also be captured by the small class of ultra-rich individuals who have far more money than they could ever spend on their own (yet still want more).
This isn’t lost on workers. There’s been a lot of reporting in recent years on the number of jobs that could be lost due to automation — between 33 percent to 47 percent by the early 2030s, depending on the report you’re reading — and this AI-driven, robot-powered future of work is not being welcomed by people who have already been hit by deindustrialization and the shift to more precarious work in the years since the Great Recession. It’s easy for tech workers to advocate for software and machines to take over more of the workload because they’re more likely than most to keep their jobs, but a lot of people in the United States aren’t so eager.
In March, Gallup found that 58 percent of Americans see artifical intelligence, robotics, and automation as a bigger threat to their jobs than immigration and outsourcing over the next 10 years; and a further study with Northwestern University identified that 73 percent of Americans think artifical intelligence will eliminate more jobs than it will create and 63 percent expect these technologies to increase inequality.
Some may find these views irrational, especially when technology is so often presented as a net positive in our culture, yet is it any surprise that people fear the loss of their jobs to automation when their survival depends on the income they earn from their labor while living in a capitalist system that is heavily skewed in favour of the wealthy and powerful with little support for those who fall on hard times? If they lose their jobs, most Americans don’t trust that the government will come through with much support for them.
Being home many of the companies driving the technological “disruption” of society, it should come as no surprise that San Francisco is also seeing growing anger at new technologies when even tech workers making six-figure salaries are being forced out of the city due to financial pressure. In March, the Guardian reported that two of the six autonomous-vehicle collisions in the city in the first two months of 2018 were caused by people who purposefully drove into the vehicles after identifying them as driverless and GM Cruise vehicles were assaulted by angry pedestrians twice in January alone.
However, the most devastating story of the dark side of tech disruption was that of Doug Shifter, a livery driver who committed suicide in front of New York City Hall in February after having his livelihood devastated by ride-hailing companies and feeling he had exhausted all options available to him to combat the technological forces that had decimated his income and more than doubled his working hours — and Shifter isn’t the only one: taxi-driver suicides are becoming more common in the Big Apple.
The fear among many workers and the human cost of technological disruption makes it essential that we begin to ask important question about how we want the automation of work to proceed. Is the move-fast-and-break-things model pushed by Silicon Valley essential to the next stage of technological change? Do people have to continue to suffer in the name of progress? We’ve seen this play out many times before, but the postwar period also demonstrated how the wealth generated by economic growth can be shared in a (slightly) more equitable way, and there’s no question that the same can still be done in the present day — if not something even more radical.
Contrast the high numbers of Americans who admit to being scared about what automation means for their future to the 80 percent of Swedes who expressed positive views about robots and artifical intelligence in a 2017 survey by the European Commission, and it may seem that they’re living on a different planet. The truth is that the social systems under which Swedes and Americans live are vastly different and go a long way in explaining the difference in opinion on how technology might affect people’s jobs and livelihoods.
In the United States, people do not trust their governments and the social safety net is frayed, difficult to access, and does not provide the support needed to help one get back on their feet. That’s not the case in Nordic countries. Sweden, along with its Scandinavian cousins, has a very strong network of public services that are designed to take stress and worry out of people’s lives by making necessary services easy to access and providing income support and retraining to those who’ve lost their jobs.
Whereas Americans believe that if they lose their jobs, they could lose their standards of living and struggle to find another job at the same income scale, Swedes trust that their government will provide the necessary assistance to help them transition to a new role and that services won’t become inaccessible simply because they lose their job.
Americans are justified in fearing automation. In the way that robotics and artificial intelligence are currently set to impact employment, it will be the executives and shareholders of major corporations who will see the lion’s share of the benefit, while there’s nothing in place to ensure that workers who are fired as a result of new technologies will be better off — indeed, there’s a good chance they could be worse off, as many factory and office workers found themselves as they transitioned into the service sector in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
Mass automation wouldn’t necessarily be a negative development, but if it occurs in a capitalist system designed to funnel the spoils of economic and productivity growth to those who are already sitting on billions of dollars, there’s no question that most people would not see the benefits and would likely take to smashing the machines responsible for their immiseration, as so many other workers have done before them. And it would be hard to blame them for it.
