Will Robots Do Our Work?

I contributed this article to the October 2017 edition of THink Magazine. The issue, “Challenges of Our Time,” looked at big picture challenges facing humanity. My piece focused on long-running trends in the mix and availability of work, and the technological waves that drove the shifts in those trends in thinking about whether “robots” might be looking to steal our gigs, as well as what that might lead to.

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes

Few things are universally revered. Family, friendship, music, sharing meals, and a strong work ethic are a few that come to mind. The last one seems the odd one out in the list, but it has long been in service to the rest. If you wanted to spend quality time with family and friends, in comfortable homes or public spaces, while being entertained or enjoying a nice meal, you had to work for it.

For millennia, everything was done by human hand and so a good work ethic was an important value to ingrain into society. The field was not going to sow itself, nor would the house be self-built. Each had to pull their own weight to ensure their basic needs were met.

Since the first stone tools were used, technology has been augmenting work. It typically creeps in at a pace that is not broadly disruptive, but it occasionally lurches forward in periods we call “industrial revolutions”. Three such phases (mechanisation, mass production, and automation) have brought humanity great advances. But with each revolution, the mix of jobs shifted as technology took over existing work and helped foster new jobs. In the West, it started with work in the primary sector (agriculture, mining, and fishing) being transformed by relatively simple, but powerful machines.

We may now be entering a fourth industrial revolution wherein robotics and artificial intelligence threaten to greatly alter our economies. How they will impact society largely remains to be seen, but there is growing concern of mass job loss as highly adaptable machines and software could creep into areas that have long seemed safe from technologically driven displacement. The quaternary sector may explode, but can it keep pace with the jobs it destroys?

Human labour (both manual and cognitive) is hardly an endangered species. But if a significant portion of it quickly evaporates thanks to technological advances — in an era when things like incomes, healthcare, and retirement savings are often directly tied to jobs — how will we react?

Take the United States (US) trucking and taxi sectors for example. Driverless vehicles threaten to erode into these millions of jobs, while also delivering a significant hit to the supporting industries and the communities that truckers and taxi drivers visit along their routes. A doomsday scenario in which these jobs evaporate overnight seems farfetched, but what might it do to a sizeable city if the local fleet of cabs or the “ridesharing” vehicles were all hurriedly replaced? Assuming the costs continue to come down, and the capabilities continue to increase, is it realistic to think — barring unforeseen technical issues or possibly a high-profile accident — that the technology is not primed for proliferation, and human labour headed for the curb?

Towards uncharted territory?

If these trends continue, and technological progress accelerates, we may be headed toward some interesting challenges. Longer work weeks have long been favoured by employers for their ability to reduce the associated costs of benefits. Replacing human labour with technology can afford similar savings, while also offering a host of other benefits (at least from the view of the employer). Making such changes are rational choices for firms that are expected to maximise returns. But aggregated up to a macro perspective, this can become problematic. If technology progressively erodes work and the collective response is to employ fewer workers (and new jobs are not created to replace the ones that have been lost), the burden that is created will fall disproportionally on the unemployed individuals and, to a lesser extent, society at large.

Technological advances might provide significant boosts to economies, but they may also decrease social mobility — a measure of the movement of individuals between a society’s social strata — which could lead to a smaller economic pie. The UK lags just behind the average measure of social mobility for Western Europe. By bringing their society in line with the region’s average, it is believed that it would bring an associated increase in annual GDP of around 2% — equal to an additional £590 per person.

It is no surprise to see firms like Facebook and Google put massive investments into the development of new technology. But when an auto-manufacturer like Toyota jumps into the deep-end with US$100 million for technological investment, we are either seeing a phase of irrational exuberance on the investment side, or those making the investment decisions see that we are on the leading edge of something big.

When he gazed into his crystal ball, Keynes saw a future in which he thought we would be working around 15 hours a week. His only worry with that was that we might not know what to do with ourselves — the perils of idle hands. One recent study lends some support to this fear as it found that we have gained about 4 hours per week of leisure time thanks to the automation of some of our household chores. On average, we have largely filled those hours watching television. But unless such viewing is somehow destructive, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. If we could go back in time and ask people whether they would rather manually wash dishes and clothes, or zone out watching TV, I’m guessing the choice would be an easy one for most.

Further, the television viewers were reclaiming non-work hours for leisure. But if we started making significant reductions to today’s work week, we would be looking at a different opportunity, one in which we might encourage people to use some of the time that has been freed up for the collective good. Rather than reducing the number of people working, we could just reduce the number of hours worked, while maintaining our income levels. All would do their part and all could take care of their needs. Because the question is not whether technology will continually take on more of our work — that seems assured — but whether we’ll ask technology to lift us all up, or we’ll allow it to drive us apart.

Looking back through history, the length of a work week is a relative notion, but the 40-hour standard has been around long enough to have been normalised for those who are alive today. For us, changes will not be viewed as the continuation of a long-running trend, but as a break from the norm. This opens the door for treating these hours differently than prior gains. And since we have successfully continued inculcating the need for industriousness long after it was necessary for a reasonable measure of subsistence, could we not redirect those efforts towards socially beneficial aims?

If we ever made Keynes’ vision a reality, I would suggest we encourage community-building with mottos like, “Fifteen for my livelihood. Fifteen for the social good.” Maybe that wouldn’t work for everyone, but a future in which we all have relatively comfortable lives, significantly more free time, and large numbers of us coming together to build community sounds great to me. If we can agree on that, I say we let the robots have all the work they want.

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