Will You Lose Your Job to Automation?

By Denny Pencheva, Lecturer European Politics & Public Policy UCL & Kostas Maronitis, Leeds Trinity University

Type ‘how many jobs have been lost to automation’ in Chat GPT’s search engine and prepare to be underwhelmed.

Its response reproduces the old argument that it is repetitive and routine jobs that are being susceptible to automation. Chat GPT retrieves two studies conducted by the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Global institute, respectively. Both studies suggest that automation has led to the ‘displacement’ of some jobs, particularly those that involve routine, repetitive tasks that can be easily automated. The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that automation could displace up to 375 million jobs globally by 2030. However, the study also notes that automation could create new jobs and lead to higher productivity, as well as new types of work that we cannot yet imagine.

Interestingly, the advent of Chat GPT and the subsequent incorporation of AI applications into search engines, surveillance networks and creative work such as creative writing, music composition and photography have generated a new wave of fears over job insecurity and massive job losses to algorithms and automated machines. Anchored in John Maynard
Keynes’ infamous prediction of widespread technological unemployment ‘due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses of labour (Keynes, 2105 [1930]: 80), economics and social sciences have always understood the relationship between technology and employment as a zero-sum game.

The devil is in the details

In our book, Robots and Immigrants: who is stealing jobs?, we avoid the simplistic understanding that jobs just disappear. By focusing on the highly competitive and deregularised labour market of Brexit Britain, we argue that the rhetoric that either labour automation, or labour migration cause unemployment is misleading. Rather, such claims are meant to function as disciplinary discursive devices that seek to create a perpetually anxious workforce, unaware of — or too scared to fight for, its working and political rights.

On the one hand, the current debates on automation highlight the unsustainability of the current model of economic growth, sustained by low wages, immigration, and the expansion of the service economy. Moreover, such debates have evolved to include highly skilled, professional jobs which were previously thought as immune to technological threats, such as accounting, language teaching and translation. The ever-expanding group of workers that are told they need to fear for their jobs is indicative of the fragility of the well-established mantra that (higher) education and (higher paid) employment are the main means out of poverty and job insecurity.

On the other hand, specific segments of the private sector, such as ‘knowledge intensive businesses and high-end manufacturing, are perceived as the quintessential wealth creators, which in turn allocates a secondary role to trade unions, education institutions, and the welfare state, which are expected to play a supportive and pro-active role in enabling the private sector. In other words, these economic areas are politically construed as major platforms for imagining a post-scarcity society in which work is radically reconfigured in order to serve the interests of capital.

The case for uninterrupted technological progress at the service of the economy rests on the efficient management of ‘the period of adjustment’. Such period implies that technological advances and their impact on the labour market are inevitable, and that any inequalities resulting from this process are a natural consequence. However, the so-called period of adjustment has proved to be a permanent state of affairs that serves the purpose of disciplining the working population by curtailing their demands and expectations.

Adaptation and resilience are the responsibility of the individual.

The explicit links between work-related performance, knowledge, skills, and the ability or even desire to remain employable in a competitive labour market indicate that precarity is a quintessential feature of the contemporary economy and society and technology alone cannot
be responsible for job losses. Therefore, the immediate threat of job losses needs to be evaluated in terms of the competitiveness of the labour force and its multiple categorisations according to gender, race, education, (dis)ability, and age.

Fears of unemployment due to automation and artificial intelligence, but also due to an unproductive workforce reconfigure the relationship between the state and the economy. Such fears also legitimise a specific kind of governmentality, which seeks to prioritise the retraining and reskilling of anxious, unwilling, or disabled workforce in order to achieve
economic growth and labour productivity.

With that in mind, policymakers accept that some jobs will be incompatible with the future direction of the economy and eventually disappear while new ones will emerge. Notwithstanding demands for the protection and re-education of workers there is a shift from the integration of workers as a collective into a new social and economic order shaped by automation and the digital economy to an individual project of self-realisation.

To that effect, governments and corporate leaders transfer the uncertainty of unemployment from the corporation to the worker. It is the individual worker’s responsibility to reskill and adapt; resilience is salvation, which is to be found within each eager and dynamic individual with a strong work ethic.

Once retrained and once again employable, workers are indoctrinated to embrace their precarity and to continue to forfeit their working rights and human needs in order to fulfil the promise of an automated, productive economy. Bonus points if they feel indebted to their employer for allowing them to keep their employment status.

* The blog is published as part of the Reshaping Work efforts to stimalute timely debate. The opinions and views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Reshaping Work.