Reading 11: Automation should be okay?? I hope???

Automation is no doubt impacting employment in the United States and around the world, but as the Wall Street Journal article points out, nobody knows at what scale. It is generally accepted that many of the lower level, redundant jobs are the most susceptible to replacement but these replacements give way to the generation of new, higher-skilled and higher-paying jobs. As the Newsweek article notes, “[Automation] has mostly hurt the less educated and helped the more educated.” This article goes on to say that more and more jobs are going to require skilled labor, which means a higher educated workforce. If this becomes the case we risk a situation where only the college-educated can find work and subsequently afford to send their children to receive a college education.

I think that automation can free humans for other endeavors, but I think automation at the speed and scale that people are predicting is dangerous. Halting or tempering of automation would be a nightmare to enforce because there are so many small technological advancements that influence employment of unskilled laborers. And this automation has been going on for decades. Do we need to go all the way back to the days where “computers” were women doing math? I think that automation is inevitable but the tech industry needs to find mediums through which to automate without devastating families and communities financially.

I think that I am comfortable with AI taking over routine, mundane human activities. I don’t know why, but something still feels inherently wrong about AI taking over activities such as care giving. Maybe I just haven’t seen the kind of AI projects that can make quick, human decisions about a situation based on environment, personalities of individuals involved, and all the other prior information.

I understand that automation will increase the unemployment rate but I am hopeful that with this new technology, new careers will arise. I love the quote from the Newsweek article, “Nobody’s grandmother was a search engine optimization specialist. Today, that job pays pretty well.” With that in mind, I don’t think a Universal Basic Income would be particularly effective in combating the rise of automation. Perhaps a better solution would be better teaching the skills required to fill these new roles during lower education (so that people beyond the college-educated can get jobs). I think there are too many potential negatives associated with a UBI as noted in the Wired article when they point out, “Conservatives against UBI worry that it will decrease incentives to work and cost too much, racking up a bill that those who do work will have to pay. Skeptical liberals worry that employers will use it as an excuse to pay even lower wages.” Overall I think there have to be more practical responses to the employment worries resulting from automation.

Ultimately I think that automation will be a benefit to humanity. I think it will free up more people to research important, maybe life-saving things, go into the arts, or something else along those lines. I do however, think there will be a huge transition period towards this robotization of much of the current jobs where employers need to be conscious of automating at a pace society can digest. This cannot be a light switch where all of a sudden a huge percentage of American’s are unemployed with nothing to fall back on.