“There are more net jobs in the world today than ever before, after hundreds of years of technological innovation and hundreds of years of people predicting the death of work. The logic on this topic is crystal clear. Because of that, the contrary view is necessarily religious in nature, and, as we all know, there’s no point in arguing about religion.”
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These are the words of tech mogul Marc Andreessen, in an e-mail exchange with me on the effect of advancing technologies on employment. Andreessen staunchly believes that the exponential curve that is enabling creation of an era of abundance will create new jobs faster and more broadly than before, and describes my assertions that we are heading into a jobless future, a luddite fallacy.
I wish he were right, but he isn’t. And this isn’t a religious debate; it’s a matter of public policy and preparedness. With the technology advances presently on the horizon, not only are low-skilled jobs at risk; so are jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast. It will shake up entire industries and eliminate professions.
Within ten years, we will see Uber laying off most of its drivers as it switches to self-driving cars; manufacturers will start replacing workers with robots; fast-food restaurants will install fully automated food-preparation systems; artificial intelligence-based systems will start doing the jobs of most office workers in accounting, finance and administration. The same will hold true for professionals such as paralegals, pharmacists, and customer-support representatives. All this will occur simultaneously, and the pace will accelerate in the late 2020s.
Another technologist whom I hold in high regard, Vinod Khosla, worries as I do about the effect of widening income disparity.
Discussing the revolutionary progress in machine-learning technology which is enabling computers to analyse information and make judgements better than human beings can, Khosla writes: “With less need for human labour and judgement, labour will be devalued relative to capital and even more so relative to ideas and machine learning technology. In an era of abundance and increasing income disparity, we may need a version of capitalism that is focused on more than just efficient production and also places greater prioritisation on the less desirable side effects of capitalism.”
So the real debate is about the new version of capitalism: do we design this or pretend everything will be okay as the tech elites get richer and people who lose their jobs become poorer?
The impact of advancing technologies will be different in every country. China will be the biggest global loser because of the rapid disappearance of its manufacturing jobs. It hasn’t created a safety net, and income disparity is already huge, so we can expect greater turmoil there. But developing economies will be big winners.
In his office in Mexico City in June, I had a lengthy discussion on this issue with Mexican industrialist Carlos Slim Domit.
Slim’s solution is to institute a three-day work week so everyone can find employment and earn the money needed for leisure and entertainment. This is not a bad idea. In the future we are heading into, the cost of basic necessities, energy, and even luxury goods such as electronics will fall low enough to seem almost free — just as cell-phone minutes and information cost practically nothing now. It’s a matter of sharing the few jobs that will exist in an equitable way.
The concept of a universal basic income is also gaining popularity worldwide as it becomes increasingly apparent that declining costs and elimination of bureaucracies, make it possible for governments to provide citizens with income enough for their basic necessities. The idea is to give everyone a stipend covering living costs and to get government out of the business of selecting what social benefits people should have. Encouraging individual initiative in the work that people pursue, in fields ranging from philosophy and the arts to pure science and invention, will result in enrichment of cultures in ways we can’t foresee.
Another opportunity is for governments to direct labour to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of cities. With sensors, new nanomaterials and composites, and 3D-printing technologies, we could be building massive smart cities that use energy more efficiently and provide a better quality of life for their inhabitants.
Another potential solution, the brainchild of internet pioneer Vint Cerf and entrepreneur David Nordfors, is to develop AI (artificial intelligence) software that matches jobs to the skills, talent, passions, experiences, and values of each individual on the planet. People hate their jobs, consequently losing tremendous amounts of productivity. With jobs tailored to each person’s interests, we could create work environments in which people give 100 percent of their capability to work and the economy expands because more is being done. This is indeed a utopian dream; but it’s something we can and should aspire towards.
The problems and possibilities are endless in the future we are headed into. We need to be prepared and develop a new version of capitalism that benefits all.
(Vivek Wadhwa is director of research at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and vice-president of academics, Singularity University, USA)