Does the Future Work?
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Sure, we're all freaked out by AI. But for the creative and purpose-driven among us, could automation be the first step towards more meaningful work?
In the early half of the 20th century, the future of automation looked bright. John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2000, the Western world would enjoy a 15-hour work week thanks to new technology, while Marx imagined a post-scarcity economy in which humans had turned the automation of labour to their advantage. This idea has been dubbed ‘fully automated luxury communism’.
In this futurist utopia, citizens would own the means of production – essentially robots – and sit back while they did the heavy lifting. Without the need to perform menial labour, humans would be free to pursue virtuous interests outside of work, like philosophy, or relationships, or gardening.
Melina Bunting is the editor of Deakin’s Disruptr magazine and has worked extensively with the university’s A²I² lab researching artificial intelligence. Melina doesn’t necessarily envision a future in which there are no jobs but in which menial tasks make way for more purposeful work.
“I’d like to see some of the more administrative, mundane aspects of my job automated,” she says. “Things like writing up transcripts of interviews, or sending e-mails… Things that don’t necessarily require that touch of human feeling.”
In a world in which nearly 600 million people live in poverty, long working hours are known to degrade mental health, and labour can quite literally kill you, an automated future might seem like an antidote to capitalist drudgery.
Of course, the current world of work diverges pretty sharply from that vision. With tech giants in a race to automate the world, the power and profits are in the control of a shrinking few while workers currently face 45% of their current activities being automated.
For this reason, AliBaba Group co-founder Jack Ma advocates for preparing the next generation to compete with robots: “We should teach our kids sports, music, painting, art. Everything we teach should be different from machines.”
But whether we’re clawing back our livelihood from robots or happy to sit back and let them do the work, it seems human input will still be vital to the future world of work, with innately human skills becoming more and more valued.
As Melina puts it, “There’s an overwhelming amount of stuff that goes into making a human.”
First, there are specifically human skills that cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence, no matter how well-programmed. At face value, it may seem like robots can think as well as humans can – or perhaps better. Google’s chess-playing AlphaZero AI beat the world chess champion after teaching itself for just four hours. Machine learning is advancing in its ability to analyse the complex trends of the stock market and predict its movement. And because AI can work with multiple variables and spit out endless outputs, it can even design some pretty cool stuff.
But these technical abilities don’t include the human traits that contribute to strategic thinking, which is not simply the sum of tactics, analysis and the ability to juggle variables. Creative and strategic thought is deeply human, relying on empathy, artistry, nuance, leadership and personal experience. (Even Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the ancient Chinese guide to winning in battle, highlighted the importance of human understanding in military strategy.) Likewise, interpersonal skills like compassion and conversational ability are irreplicable by computers, vital to careers like nursing, teaching and psychiatry.
Melina points to Sunspring, a short film produced from an AI-generated screenplay, as an example of how machines fall short of replicating a human experience.”It’s at turns bizarre and strangely poetic, even existential,” says Melina, “but it feels like it’s missing something.”
And there’s of course the question of whether human beings want to do away with our jobs. While endless holidays and robot servants may seem attractive, work is important for our fulfilment and sense of self. Psychology professor Barry Schwartz found that working gives us a sense of autonomy and direction which, through skill-building, results in personal development. In fact, Buddhist monks see even the most tedious chores to hold spiritual meaning.
Does this mean we should accept our fate as worker drones? Of course not, nor should we look to do away with jobs altogether. It might take some changes to our economic structure, but there’s enormous potential for automation to reduce our timesheets and allow us to focus on work that matters.