Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) make a similar argument, emphasizing how digital automation now extends beyond routine, manual ‘blue collar’ work to ‘white collar’ occupations such as journalism, advertising, lawyering, medicine and other middle-class professions. For capital to survive, radically new social policies would be required, including the introduction of a universal basic income or citizen’s wage (an idea we discuss in our conclusion to this book). Such prophecies seemed corroborated by a 2013 study from Oxford economists Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, suggesting that 47 per cent of the 702 occupations into which US jobs are conventionally sorted are ‘likely to be substituted by computer capital’ within two decades. Coming amidst AI exploits like Watson’s Jeopardy victory and the defeat of grandmaster Lee Sedol by Google’s AlphaGo, this study helped make the hailing of future robot overlords a virulent cultural meme.
Against this, the Business-as-Usual position is championed by professional economists (Autor 2015). It usually suggests that the achievements of narrow AI are mainly in formalized and/or highly predictable situations. These limitations, alongside the regulatory problems confronting technologies such as self-driving cars, will, Business-as-Usual theorists argue, slow AI adoption, making a sudden-onset, across-the-board crisis unlikely. More importantly, while automation destroys some jobs, it creates others. Some emerge in the very industries that build automating technologies, such as the data scientists and microworkers who make AIs. But other new employment opportunities emerge even in the industries AI automates. So it is suggested that autonomous vehicles may make truckers and taxi-drivers obsolete, but will create jobs for engineers designing hardware and software, as well as for workers ‘taking customer calls, cleaning and repairing cars, and updating ... high-definition maps’ (T. Lee 2018). To stay competitive, firms will have to pass some benefit on to consumers in the form of lower prices; this will increase real income levels, enhance consumption and raise employment. The ‘displacement effect’ of automation – workers being thrown out of jobs by AIs – will be offset by the ‘income effect’ of heightened demand for labour (Hawkesworth, Berriman and Goel 2018). Business-as-Usual advocates admit the possibility of a ‘difficult transition’ and reiterate that ‘there will be winners and losers’, but the overall message is that AI-driven job loss will be limited, and remediable by skills upgrading: capitalism should keep calm and carry on.
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inhuman power