Automation and AI: The double-edged sword
Disruptive has certainly been a trendy word in the world of technology and business. It carries a positive connotation, it is thrown like a catch-phrase at meetings to inspire people to build something amazing. It certainly works, people thrive for change and impact. What’s best for motivation than to know the reach your work might have.
However, we fail to recognize the other side of the coin. Disruption brings on drastic change, it displaces an established technology and shakes up the entire market. More often than not, we fail to envision the ramifications of this impact. Humans are adaptable by nature, they change, react and cope. We are creatures optimized for change. However, this takes time, in an era when the propagation of technology spreads like wild-fire.
As markets shift and mutate with the impact of the ever more frequent innovation. Humans cope, and this coping process for many of us humans may mean an unmet skill gap and unemployment, a rather turbulent transition. As you fail to provide for yourself and your family, while being in most cases incapable of furthering your studies to meet the demand of the new labor market. After the climate crisis, unemployment is one of the monsters we must slay in the current century, but more on this later.
There was a time when the rate of innovation, allowed humans to swiftly transition into new mutated industries with ease. However, as humanity’s prosperity thrives and expands the resources allocated to research, development and applied technology grows exponentially. Today, most developing countries are starting to pitch in to the world’s research pool. Just imagine the impact an academic population like India might have on the advances of science and technology, and as more developing countries fast-forward into development with the help of technology the impact is bound to increase. This has engaged humanity’s hyperdrive into the future, with a continuously increasing rate of innovation. Humans on the other hand have remained relatively the same for most of the last centuries, we even continue to drag the same education system since the industrial revolution, but this deserves an entire article on itself.
Automation will play a massive role in this ongoing transition to the Era of prosperity of the human race. One of the technologies I’ve place quite a lot of hope on is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. As Computational power increases, more advanced architectures become feasible to develop and train, and colossal datasets become more readily available, the power we are unlocking is beyond our current imagination. Current state-of-the-art applications, like self driving cars, image recognition medical diagnostics systems or just what to watch on your streaming service on a rainy afternoon will seem like mere proof of concepts. The ramifications in politics, medicine, manufacturing, services and research itself is about to turn all the knobs up to 11. Whether we rejoice in this prosperity collectively or if it will be concentrated on a very small group of people is the issue I’d rather tackle today, since most authors are currently speculating on the wonders that technology might bring about. (Unless you are taking into account dystopian science fiction novels.)
Studies have shown a continuously growing wealth gap around the world. Last year the top 8% of the population accounted for 85% of the world’s wealth. While the bottom 75% of the population accounted for less than 3% of the world’s wealth. [1]
In 2018 World Inequality Report, current trends predicted an erosion of the global middle class and a further concentration on the top 1 percentile.
This is no surprise, in a world where the vast majority of the population rely strictly on their labor as their sole source of income. We need to start having the conversation about what will happen when it is no longer profitable to employ the vast majority of the population because automation has surpassed human labor in every aspect. An issue that seems to be right around the corner, in the middle of a democratic and environmental crisis.
What will happen when precision agriculture and agrotech allows us to produce enough food to feed the entire population twice? Or automation, machine vision and supply chain optimization using AI allow us to affordably provide housing and shelter for every man, woman and child. What will happen when unemployment is no longer a matter of skill-gap. Similar to how automobiles supplanted cavalry, what happens when humans are no longer needed for the jobs that ensure our survival. On our struggle to stay alive us humans have rarely had the opportunity to question the very fabric of labor, every member of the community had to carry its share of the burden if they wanted a place at the dinning table. Automation and AI make us question this fundamental truth of our current society. Our current model was designed to deal with scarcity, meanwhile we start to experience what might be an era of abundance. Should the prosperity of the Human kind be privatized or should we care for every unborn child to have access to universal basic human needs? What are these basic human needs? I think there has been a consensus for more than 70 years. [3]
Technology does not exist in a vacuum. From the social sciences we need to strive to understand it and as technologists we must make sure we invite them to the table.
[1] — Credit-Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2018
https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news-and-expertise/the-global-wealth-pyramid-growth-with-regional-transformations-201811.html
[2] —World Inequality Report 2018 https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf
[3] — Universal Declaration of Human Rights https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
