May Day is a big day in Finland, or at least it used to be before the pandemic made large-scale outdoor gatherings impossible. Originally celebrated as the Workers’ Day, or Labour Day, the first day of May (and also the last day of April) was first hijacked by the students and later by the entire society.
For as long as I can remember, these two days have been characterized by dinners, parties, hullabaloo, picnics and get-togethers in parks. Of course, there’s still remains a political flavor on May 1st, which manifests itself through marches and speeches. For the majority of the Finnish people, however, this time of the year marks the beginning of spring and it’s celebrated on par with midsummer and new year.
Once again, on this special day, I’m writing down some of my thoughts on how intelligent automation and AI will impact the way we work in the future, and perhaps more importantly, what kind of work will remain for us humans to perform. I’ll also say a few things about universal basic income (UBI), as I think it will be a key feature of future societies.
With all technological innovations come some degree of fear of how it will impact existing systems. I’ll bet that even the wheel was met with skepticism thousands of years ago. During the industrial revolution people really began to witness dramatic changes, fueled by new technologies, occuring at a rapid pace. Understandably it led to large-scale worries of how the workers, and work in general, will be impacted.
As we know, the industrial revolution didn’t cause massive unemployment as people who had been doing something, say driving a horse-drawn carriage, found new work instead, such as driving a car or bus. This is of course a gross simplification, but nevertheless I thinks it’s safe to say that by and large people were able to re-employ themselves doing something similar as before but with a higher degree of productivity.
So, now as we’re again talking about new technologies threatening to displace millions of jobs – and mind you, this time not only blue-collar jobs – the argument is the same as it’s been for over a hundred years: Don’t worry, technology and automation will again give rise to even more new jobs, and people will find something else of higher value to do instead of their old job.
But is there any guarantee that this time things will work out the same way it did before? I don’t think so. Furthermore, I believe we have clear indications of why this is the case.
First of all, intelligent automation is already here and it’s accelerating at a stupendous pace. It’s not sci-fi anymore and thanks to major developments in machine learning (and in particular the fact that we now have the computing power required run complex deep learning neural networks), our lives and the work we do are increasingly steered by algorithms. They decide what news we see, what consumer products we buy, and what relationships we form.
Second, intelligent automation will displace jobs at a much larger scale than ever before. Any task that is repetitive, or which is bound by a certain set of rules, can be automated. We’re not just talking about mundane or dangerous physical jobs, but any kind of jobs. If you are using a computer to perform tasks in a repetitive or predictable fashion, your job will be automated away. Just look at the stellar case of UiPath, a robotic process automation (RPA) startup that grew at a stunning pace and IPO’d a few days ago giving the company a market cap of over $38 billion. A good example of RPA is how news articles about corporate earnings are being produced today. Previously, these articles were written by human journalists, but since they follow a certain template, software robots are now producing these stories. Same can be seen also in sports journalism.
Third, even though new job opportunities would arise as a result of the widespread automation, I predict that there will be a huge mismatch between the skill sets needed for performing the new jobs vs. what was needed for performing the old jobs. And it’s not just a matter of lacking skills – it might equally well be a matter of lacking interests. Those who previously loved doing X might simply not at all want to do Y.
Five years ago on Labor Day, I wrote about the skills needed for a robotized future. In that article I referenced a book called “Metaskills” by Marty Neumeier, in which he presents five essential skills for succeeding in the age of intelligent machines:
Feeling, which in this context refers to intuition and empathy.
Seeing, which is about systems thinking and the ability to grasp the big picture.
Dreaming, which is a form of applied imagination and the capability of being original.
Making, which is a generative approach to solving problems.
Learning, or rather learning how to learn (autodidacticism), i.e. the act of learning about subjects in which one has had little formal education.
The gist of the book is that if we’re going to thrive in an robotized and automated future, we need to master new metaskills, i.e. "skills about skills" or "high-level skills that inform other skills". I still think there’s much truth in that statement.
In a new book called “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation”, New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose asks the question: What does it mean to be a human in a world that is increasingly built by and for machines? He is neither optimistic or pessimistic, but very concerned and describes “a hopeful, pragmatic vision of how people can succeed in the machine age by making themselves irreplaceably human”.
The key themes in Roose’s 9 rules can be summarized as follows:
Do work that is surprising, social, and scarce.
Demote your phone.
Work near other people.
Treat AI like an army of chimpanzees.
Add more friction to your life.
A central argument in the book is that people should not compete with machines head-on. There’s no point in trying to become more efficient, fast, and data-driven. Instead we should let machines be machines and people should do things that only humans can do, i.e. creative, inspiring, and meaningful things. Things needed for performing surprising, social, and scarce work.
Surprising work means non-repetitive and non-predictable work, such as teaching in a kindergarten. Social work means work that requires empathy, such as being a therapist or psychologist. Scarce work means any kind of work that requires a rare combination of skills, such as restoring old historical buildings to their former glory with modern tools and methods.
Whether or not we will succeed in changing our societies – and most importantly our educational systems – so that we’ll be prepared for a robotized and automated future remains to be seen. It’s clear that we humans need to do something, which gives us a sense of usefulness. Without meaningful work, life would become a drag for most of us.
A key question is not only what that meaningful work should look like, but also how much of that we should perform on a weekly basis. Who says 8 hours of work on 5 days in a week is optimal? After all, most of the “hard and boring work” will in any case be performed by robots, be they physical software robots.
In order to make ends meet on a societal level, I think it’s clear we will need a UBI of some sort. Probably a version of UBI which is not entirely universal – in the sense that you wouldn’t have to do anything in order to receive it – meaning that some form of work or commitment that benefits the greater good should be required. I’ll be writing more about my thoughts on UBI in upcoming articles.
To summarize, for a long time I have been very optimistic about technological innovations and about the future in general. I’ve often even described myself as a tech enthusiast and optimist. While that’s still largely true, I’ve come to share similar worries that Kevin Roose described in his book.
Making the societal and political changes needed for enabling us to live good lives in the future will be a monumental challenge. One that I sincerely hope we will succeed in solving, but knowing how incredibly irrational humans occasionally can be (and here I’ll just drop three words: Word War II), it’s not at all certain that we’ll be able to rise up to the challenge.
To succeed we need to broaden our horizons and look further into the future in our political and societal debates. In addition to talking about required policy changes, we should also increasingly talk about ethical and moral issues imposed by new tech. Chaos and suffering caused by uncontrolled technological disruption is, like Yuval Harari repeatedly has warned us about, one of the three most important existential risks we face, and must solve, during the 21st century.