Should we fear the rise of the machines? And if so, should it be for the reason science fiction suggests?
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has created conflicting opinions. There's a school of thought that machines with artificial intelligence will bring about a utopian world; equally, there are plenty of people who believe quite the opposite, that AI will be mankind's downfall. Steven Hawking has said that AI could be the "worst event in the history of our civilization." Elon Musk is another who cautions about the dangers of AI. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is a high-profile proponent of AI and says that he is "really optimistic" about its future.
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| Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg: Differing views on AI |
The rise of AI, the prospect of the machines taking over and attempting to wipe out mankind à la the Terminator films is an enduring science fiction trope, and it's by no means a recent one either. E.M. Forster's 1909 short story, The Machine Stops, posits a world in which mankind has become almost totally reliant on a machine that provides for their every need, and that civilisation collapses when the machine stops working. It is less apocalyptic than the elimination of man by nuclear weapon-wielding robots, but more plausible perhaps as we now have become so reliant on our gadgets and the technology behind them that without them we would possibly no longer be able to function.
Setting aside any fears that the growth of AI might eventually reach the point where self-aware machines start to view mankind as a nuisance at best, and a threat at worst, and wipe us all out, there are reasons to view the rise of AI with some trepidation, although there are as ever, plenty of opposing views. Ever since the Luddites destroyed the machinery in cotton mills that were threatening their jobs, we have viewed advances in mechanisation and technology in the workplace with ambivalence. For every worker freed from the dangerous, the dirty, and the simply monotonous by mechanisation, automation, and computerisation, the trade-off is a reduction in the number of available jobs.
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| Luddites taking it out on the machines that took their jobs. |
Going back to the heyday of Tomorrow's World, before the mobile phone, before the home computer - before the spread of the office computer even - and we were frequently told that in the world of the future machines would remove the drudgery from our working lives, that we would have more leisure time as our working week reduced. Except, even then I felt that was over-optimistic; if machines reduced the number of hours we would need to work, then the amount of remuneration we would receive would fall correspondingly. Or, as it turns out today, there are fewer people doing the same number of hours (or more), while other people are herded into jobs with zero-hour contracts and precarious employment if they can find a job at all.
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| Raymond Baxter presenting Tomorrow's World, a programme that regularly predicted a utopian world in which the working week would be truncated as machines took over our jobs and increased our leisure time. |
According to the Future of Work Commission, a body set up in 2017 by Labour MP Tom Watson to look into how the UK is dealing with the new technological revolution, " the most apocalyptic predictions about the impact automation will have on jobs are far too pessimistic." Instead, the report says, " automation and artificial intelligence will create as many jobs as they destroy."[1] Watson himself says, “If the heavy lifting and routine tasks of the future can be carried out by 21st-century machines, then the workforce of the future will be free to focus on activities that generate greater economic benefits for a greater number of people. That is liberating. So I suppose what I’m really saying is – robots can set us free.”
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| Tom Watson |
Hand in hand with this, Watson and his Commission propose that employers should encourage flexible working and leave for learning, to allow employees to gain new skills as their current roles become mechanised. Worthy ideas, but perhaps naive. It is all well and good to say that as a worker's role become mechanised they can retrain and gain new skills, but it is difficult to imagine whole swathes of manual workers displaced from their roles retraining and finding positions as HR consultants or finance officers within their company, even if they had the inclination, desire, or wherewithal, if the positions simply do not exist.
As we saw with disputes on the London Underground and Southern Railways, when proposals were made to replace booking office staff and train guards with ticket machines and one-man-operated trains respectively, trade unions rarely take kindly to this sort of thing, and fight vigorously to maintain the rights of the workers to continue in their roles, even if automation can replace them; and that after all, is part of their raison d'être. And in the pursuit of retaining jobs for their members, unions can be excused pushing for them to be redeployed in roles that add no value - a bit like replacing a lorry driven by a human being with an autonomous vehicle but requiring a man to walk ahead of it waving a red flag.
It isn't just manual workers who are threatened by the rise of the machines in the workplace. As anyone who worked in an office in the 1970's will testify, mechanisation, automation, and computerisation replaced the tedious manual tasks we were all engaged in, enabling employers to make savings by reducing the headcount. For the workers who remained, rarely did the amount of work reduce, in fact as many discovered, workloads increased - the concept of doing more with less, is not a new one.
These changes, together with reducing and removing redundant and duplicated processes and tasks that add no value, have enabled organisations to shrink their workforce still further; and it's likely to get worse. According to the think-tank Reform, about 250,000 jobs could be replaced by robots by 2030, and these are jobs such as administrators in Whitehall and the NHS, GP receptionists and the like. Reform also claims that around 30 percent of nursing duties, like collecting information and administering non-intravenous medication, could also be automated.
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| "Take two aspirin a day and come back and see me if you're no better in a fortnight." |
The sorts of numbers Reform are bandying about are based on existing technology, and technology we can currently foresee, but looking at the changes that I for one saw in nearly forty years in the workplace, these are likely to be merely the tip of the iceberg. There will be many advances that will enable the automating of processes and jobs that can only currently be performed by people which we can presently not conceive of - by way of example, when I started work the idea of mobile phones, the internet, and personal computers was the stuff of science-fiction; now we take them for granted. And if these advances come to pass then the people displaced by them are unlikely to find full-time employment elsewhere; the gig economy will expand, and as Mark Zuckerberg has argued, some form of basic universal income will be necessary.
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| What we'll be reduced to once the machines have taken all of our jobs. |
The Terminator films may have given us cause for concern that the rise of the machines could see us all wiped out by a nuclear holocaust, but personally I am more concerned that if we do all die in a hail of ICBMs, it will be the result of the actions of one or two men with dodgy hair-do's and vast nuclear arsenals, not some super-computer. AI induced armageddon is more likely to be driven by the algorithms that run the machines trading on the world's stock markets, causing financial meltdown in a frenzy of selling that drives companies out of business and bankrupts everyone.
Actually, it's even more likely we'll die of boredom if machines eventually replace almost every job on the planet, albeit that those who still do have a job will find themselves working longer and harder than ever.
Actually, it's even more likely we'll die of boredom if machines eventually replace almost every job on the planet, albeit that those who still do have a job will find themselves working longer and harder than ever.
