AI and Work

Illustration generated using DALL·E 2.

Dystopian workplace

After the pandemic, many of us are very familiar with the term ‘remote working’, but how about the term ‘virtual worker’? Just as mechanisation did for horses at the beginning of the 20th Century, so will AI do for many jobs in the 21st, and those that still require humans will quite possibly take place in one form of the metaverse or another.
You’d think I was preparing the plot of a dystopian sci-fi novel, but check your history and you will find the last sentence of the previous paragraph is pretty much on the money. You don’t have to look far to find jobs that have already been replaced by algorithms. Manufacturing, pick and pack, call centres, invoicing and bill paying, sorting, supermarket checkouts, the list is ever growing.

Education will not save you

Now, you might be thinking these are all pretty basic and often tedious jobs that have been easy to replace with automation and that the people they replace can move on to something more rewarding. But that requires retraining and an assumption that those so called ‘more rewarding’ jobs are available in great enough numbers.
But algorithms are coming for those jobs too. In education, medicine, IT, engineering, journalism and law, to name just a few of the professions where clever little algorithms are already hard at work and getting better at what they do by the millisecond. In fact, for all you know, this article could very easily have been written by a piece of code.

The citizen salary

Now I’m not saying all jobs will go the way of the horse, but more jobs than we think probably will. So what about all the people who are left jobless through no fault of their own? Well, we have to imagine all the companies that no longer have to pay for workers will be substantially more profitable than before and that perhaps, sensible governments will tax such companies accordingly. Although I am fully aware the term sensible and government are all too often oxymorons.

So what is the solution to something that is coming whether we want it or not? There is absolutely nothing wrong with AI replacing jobs as long as the workers it replaces are not left behind. People need to live, they need housing, clothing and food and economies only work if money flows through them so those same people need a degree of spending power. Which is why, if you have been paying attention of late, you will no doubt have come across the term ‘universal basic income’. A guaranteed basic income for all citizens in a country irrespective of whether they work or not, affording them a basic but sustainable standard of living. Now how about that for a thought?

Written by Ian Bowie