Call me suspicious but there appears to be a recent shift in how industry spokespeople are talking about the relationship between work and automation.
Suddenly, the conversation is no longer gloomy prognostications about robots taking our jobs; instead everyone is smiling brightly and telling us that our future is going to see us working happily alongside robots and other artificially intelligent coworkers.
Hence the suspicion.
Robin Bordoli, the chief executive of the AI company CrowdFlower, wrote a piece in December last year that may well be the template for this new approach. It very precisely positions humans and technology as coworkers. “For too long the thrust of AI has been to replace humans,” he writes. “A better framing is realising that machines and humans have complementary capabilities ... AI is about blending these respective strengths.”
While this is perfectly reasonable, what worries me is that we are seeing this “positive” approach escalate into what feels like full-scale spin, an attempt to apply lipstick to the pig of technological unemployment.
For instance, a recent AFR article was presented under the heading, “We must work alongside robots, not against them”. Written by Cindy Hook, the CEO of accounting firm Deloitte, it cheerily tells us that, “debate about [digitisation] is beset with myths and fear-mongering. Fears about robots and artificial intelligence taking jobs.” Hook is unimpressed with such talk, and argues instead that the “reality is that robotic process automation (RPA) ... is about augmenting work”.
By way of example, she mentions the introduction of artificial intelligence programs into Deloitte’s payroll systems, and explains that this has allowed them to on-shore work formerly off-shored to India. Thus, she says, “We can actually process the payroll in Australia, using a machine that thinks intuitively.” She concludes that, “I think of it as a machine working next to a person, not as a machine replacing a person.”
But what really happened here? Australian workers had already lost these jobs to India and now the Indians are losing them to AI. I’m not sure this is the positive story Hook seems to think it is.
Other examples of this spin around robots as coworkers can be found in a recent Bloomberg article looking at the automation of warehouses. Patrick Clark and Kim Bashin quote Rick Faulk, the CEO of Focus Robotics, a company helping organisations like DHL automate. He says, “The first trend was to try to replace humans. Now it’s about humans and robots working collaboratively.” After explaining that a warehouse robot now carries items to a human checker – while carefully not mentioning the human workers who no longer do the carrying – Faulk intones, “Working with robots is a fun thing to do.”
CEO Dennis Mortensen recently said that Amy Ingram, the chatbot developed by his company x.ai, has been asked out on dates by “her” fellow workers.
Such talk is insulting and, while I doubt there is any coordination in this sudden spurt of happy talk from various business types, it does appear to be the emergent narrative of a class of people who know big change is coming and who are looking for a gentle way to break it to the rest of us.
None of this is to deny that many of us will end up working with robots and other forms of artificial intelligence. The question is whether it will be quite the panacea proponents pretend. After all, to work with a robot is to work with something that requires neither pay, holidays, sick leave or even toilet breaks.
It is the robot, therefore, that will set the standard for what is an acceptable day’s work, which means that the pressure to increase human productivity, to depress wages and conditions will be relentless. As cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener observed in the 1950s, “Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.”
By hiding behind the shiny new narrative of robots and AI becoming our new workmates, we lock ourselves into the mindset of the past: instead of approaching the new technologies as a potential pathway to a better future, we enforce the status quo.
If AI and robots really are going to augment human work rather than simply replace it, then it needs to be on terms that maximise human skills like empathy, creativity, playfulness and ethics, not just in the sense of leaving humans coequals with the technology or, worse still, its subordinates.
I shudder when I listen to this TED talk by designer Maurice Conti in which he tells of a “cool project” with Bishop, a robot Conti and his partners have been experimenting with. “The humans acted as labor,” he tells us. “And then we had an AI that was controlling everything.”
The question we should be asking ourselves and our politicians is not about how we can keep some token job working next to a robot – but how the wealth generated by the increased productivity of machines can be distributed fairly and equitably to help us build a world in which the many, rather than the few, can thrive.
In other words, the case for robots in the workplace should be made on the basis that they increase human well being. It shouldn’t rely on phoney talk about AI and humans as happy happy coworkers.
