“A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass unemployment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world.”
~Jeremy Rifkin
This quote emerges in the midst of the 2020 coronovirus pandemic, with tens of millions out of work, tens of thousands dying, millions infected, and an economy falling into recession and possibly depression. It surfaces at a particularly poignant time, as those thrown out of work are thrown out indiscriminately: COVID-19 is no respecter of persons or privilege or party, striking where it will; businesses are being forced to close for a broad spectrum of reasons, from low-to-no customer traffic to spreading potential to disrupted supply chains. With so many out of work in such random patterns, we have in the course of lockdown had our notions of labor value completely rejiggered.
The lowliest among us, it turns out – the workers we tend to value least – turn out to be, when push comes to shove, the most important:
Our low-level medical personnel.
Our teachers.
Our day care workers.
Our restaurant cooks and servers.
Our grocery store employees.
Our pizza delivery kids.
The workers we tend to value least – yet the most indispensable, when our needs eclipse our wants. And those at the other end of the labor value spectrum have, for the most part, passed out of mind.
The thing is, it didn’t take the coronavirus to get us here; we were headed here already.
Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has been sounding the alarm for some time now: AI and robot process automation are about to overhaul labor value altogether, and we’ll experience the painful side of that overhaul in less than a decade. Already, AI and RPA are making huge inroads into back-end white collar industries – insurance, finance – taking mid-level jobs by the hundreds of thousands. Automation is creeping into retail and fast-food at an alarming rate; an Obama Administration report from 2017 estimated that by 2030, 83% of those jobs paying less than $20/hour will be handed over to machines.
Yang has reported that within a decade, the trucking industry will replace as many as 3 million drivers with AI control, decimating not only that labor force but its supporting labor force (truck stops, diners on interstates, etc.).
And high-end jobs won’t be spared. AI is weaving its way into medicine, doing many human tasks more accurately (reading X-rays, diagnosis, predicting outcomes, even performing surgery) and often faster. Computers already fly commercial jets better than human pilots.
And this is just the beginning. Within a generation, all dangerous labor will be performed by machines; all manual labor, dependent only upon physical strength and dexterity, will be robot work. High-precision tactile work will likewise go to machines, which will do it better and faster. Many if not most decision-making systems, in industries from healthcare to insurance to finance to legal, will be AI-based; and even engineering - the act of designing new machines and processes - will have been taken over, at least in part, by machines.
What does this portend, for a world that bases reward and social placement and lifestyle on productivity? For many generations now, society has set an individual’s value based on what they can produce, and how much. When all of that production is performed by machines, how shall human beings then be valued?
Per Rifkin, our grandchildren will have a greater sensibility than our own: they may well find our conflation of humanity and economics to be abhorrent, and be offended that we ever could have judged one another by such shallow measure. And they will, of course, be right.
Past 2050, they will be born into a world far more efficient, productive, and benign than our own, a world far less inconsistent and turbulent and error-prone; the questions of the role of science, the nature of the greater good, and the most effective policies ensuring human safety will be settled. They will, remarkably, take these things for granted, and will shake their heads when they realize that we actually resisted many of the answers.
But the greatest shift will be away from where human value shouldn’t be – labor – to an emphasis on where it should be: our affinity for community; our capacity for investment in others; our exploration of our own potential; our endless desire to explore and discover and create. In all of these endeavors, the machine is our friend and companion, enabling and empowering those explorations and potentials, expanding that value.
It’s getting from here to there that’s the trick, of course; but our grandchildren are counting on us - and who can say no to a grandchild?
Comments