Is artificial intelligence going to take over our jobs and leave us all unemployed? Relax, my children. Hi-tech Luddites, put away your social media scythes and hammers. We’ve been through all this before. When mechanical looms started putting out smoother cloth than handloom weavers, it created more jobs in the factories. When word processors took the place of stenographers, it created a gale of paperwork that needed even more people to handle it. When calculators removed the need for deriving square roots by the long division method, teachers had more time to teach calculus and trig.
Change
Which is not to say that there won’t be change. The trick with change is to know it’s coming and prepare for it. Hence this article.
Change is not without pain. In the short term, the livelihoods of workers in the old jobs are at risk. The changes in farming techniques brought about the Land Acts in Britain and led to the depopulation of the countryside and to the waves of emigration of the late Colonial era.
At the moment, developed countries are overwhelmed by a wave of reverse emigration from former colonies. But once robots take over the jobs many of our lower-paid workers do, our own workers can be retrained to take over the jobs humans are good at.
Preparing for Change
Time and again, technology makes the lives of most of us better, while dropping the burden of change on the less educated workers who are replaced. What’s different about the Artificial Intelligence Revolution is that the machines have a higher level of intelligence, and are threatening a higher, more educated and affluent level of society. Who are more politically active and more vocal. So, maybe we’ll take action sooner.
The Bottom Line
Which comes in the middle of the article today, because we have to know where we’re going before we can plan the trip.
History tells us that if a machine can do a job better than a human, then it should do that job, and free that person for a task more appropriate to human abilities. Let’s take checkout clerks, for example. People complain about automatic checkouts, but why shouldn’t those with a simple transaction get it done quickly and efficiently? Furthermore, why should a person who really needs human assistance wait in line behind those who don’t? And if the store can hire fewer people, it should be reflected in the price of food. If it isn’t, the problem is elsewhere, and personnel issues are red herrings disguising that fact. (See Critical Thinking further down.)
Education
Of course, retraining the displaced workers is the short-term solution, but with Artificial Intelligence, we have to be smarter and take the long view. Education systems can be reactors or innovators. A lot of what children are being taught in school is dictated by the needs of society. But once in a long while schools have the ability to look ahead and teach what we are going to need.
What to add becomes obvious as the labour market develops. Most future jobs will be in areas where computers don’t do very well: working with people and using creativity. The present push for more tradespeople is a perfect example. It’s going to be a long time before a robot shows up to repair your plumbing. So, we have to train more plumbers. And carpenters and electricians, etc.
The Most Important Lesson: Thinking
Recent history has demonstrated that one thing modern humans are woefully deficient in is the ability to make good decisions. Schools pay lip service to the idea of critical thinking skills, but huge segments of the population have still proved themselves vulnerable to the blandishments of a legion of scammers, con men and demagogues. How many teachers can honestly say they taught a lesson in how to detect a lie? I was in a third-year Theatre class before a prof actually taught a lesson on how advertising manipulates viewers.
Put simply, if you find yourself being replaced by a computer and you don’t have good problem-solving skills, you’re hooped.
Are THEY Taking Over?
Well, the picture above was created by an Art AI from the instruction, “Robot working in grocery store.” I don’t think Picasso and Dali need to worry about their jobs for a while.