Greater and faster technological innovation fosters concerns about loss of employment and social exclusion. But how realistic are these concerns Marc Kosciejew asks.
As technologies change, old and new anxieties rise.
When technological changes contribute to economic transformation, social and cultural anxieties tend to increase. Many people, and entire industries and professions, become concerned about the implications of technological changes on their work and economic well-being.
Throughout history, technological changes have often been perceived, whether fairly or unfairly, as threatening, especially to jobs, growth, and prosperity. During the Industrial Revolution, for instance, English textile weavers and workers feared the end of their trade by the successful introduction of new automated technologies. Their resistance to these new machines earned them the pejorative label of ‘luddites’, which has become a byword for people who oppose technological changes and progress.
The global economy is presently experiencing a major economic transformation, arguably as significant as the Industrial Revolution. The economy is becoming increasingly dependent upon information communication technologies and their associated products, services, and things. New kinds of companies, professions, and positions, based upon these information communication technologies, are turning into dominant economic players, directing and determining new economic conditions and cultures.
But these current technological changes are resulting in a new bout of angst that our increasingly sophisticated, intelligent, and versatile information communication technologies will undermine and replace many jobs and professions.
Technological anxiety typically manifests itself through two related concerns. First, there is a concern that these rapid technological changes will eventually, perhaps quickly, substitute human labour with machine labour. This perceived substitution effect, whereby jobs once performed by people are automated and assumed by smarter machines, are adding to fears that people are confronting a similar doomed fate as that of the luddites. No industry, profession, or job is seemingly spared from this threat, including manufacturing, administration, agriculture, finance, law, medicine, publishing, journalism, librarianship, and education.
Second, there is a concern about the moral implications of these technological changes for human society and welfare. Similar to the Victorian era’s moral concerns about the dehumanising effects of mechanised routine factory work, there are growing worries about similar dehumanising effects of new technologies on our personal, professional, cultural, and social lives. Although these technologies are creating new kinds of, and spaces for, information and communication, they are simultaneously fostering different kinds of exclusion, isolation, and antisocial attitudes and behaviours.
Any outcome of technological changes, whether good or bad, are choices, not destinies
There are also fears that, as technological changes create more unemployment, greater information and digital divides will grow between the so-called haves and have-nots, thereby exacerbating the social, economic, and cultural tensions usually brought about, or exacerbated, by unemployment. It is feared that this substitution effect will result in massive unemployment as larger shares of the workforce are displaced by smart machines, thereby increasing social and economic inequality.
But how realistic are these concerns? While they are legitimate, there are some important caveats to some of these gloomy predictions. The substitution effect, for instance, only shows part of the reality. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor, although increasing automation and mechanisation typically do substitute human labour – which they are actually intended to do – they can complement human labour by creating and making possible new kinds of jobs and professions.
Indeed, new technologies typically combine with new kinds of occupations that are currently not imagined. These new kinds of occupations, moreover, help compensate for those lost through substitution. Autor argues that: “The interplay between machine and human comparative advantage allows computers to substitute for workers in performing routine, codifiable tasks while amplifying the comparative advantage of workers in supplying problem-solving skills, adaptability, and creativity.”
Yet most discussions on the effects of technological changes on human labour often focus on current existing occupations. Although this focus offers important insight about which jobs and professions are confronting disruption and dislocation, it offers scant insight about the emergence of the unimagined possible occupations of the future. Many contemporary occupations in the information and communication technology industries were unimagined less than 20 years ago. The possible new jobs and professions of 20 years hence, created or affected by technological changes, are yet to be imagined. Thus, even if they may destroy jobs and professions, there are many yet unimagined or unrealised occupations, unable to be carried out by machines, which are likely to emerge.
These concerns, nevertheless, need to be taken seriously, especially as many existing jobs and professions are currently being undermined and threatened by technological changes. In order to help mitigate the more potential catastrophic consequences of technological changes, at least in the short- to medium-term, the following policy recommendations could be considered.
First, new technologies typically present both advantages and disadvantages. We must take a more active approach to shaping the good effects and managing the bad effects through engaged and informed public policy. Any outcome of technological changes, whether good or bad, are choices, not destinies. Technology does not determine these outcomes – rather, political, economic, and social institutions do. The results we want will be the ones we work on now to effect.
Second, some kind of income redistribution on a large scale, for instance through a basic income for every adult, combined with funding for education and training, could help prevent the negative impact of possible unemployment created by the substitution effect. This public policy option could be funded through new kinds of tax revenues, perhaps based on pollution, such as carbon taxes or on rents on property, specifically intellectual property. It is possible for the State to obtain at least a part of income shares from the intellectual property it helps establish and protect. All property, after all, are political, economic, and social creations, not natural entities.
This technological anxiety, however, is not new. The luddites similarly worried about their occupational and economic future because of growing automation and mechanisation. Whether or not the angst generated by present and ongoing technological changes are overblown, their concerns of disruption, displacement, and substitution, coupled with growing inequality, are legitimate. What is certain is that the dire predictions of the effects of technological changes are not inevitable or preordained. They are, instead, choices that we can determine, manage, and shape, both today and tomorrow. The choice of what we want from our technologies, in other words, is ours.
As the acclaimed writer, essayist and critic, Margaret Atwood, notes: “Every technology we develop is an extension of our own senses or capabilities. It has always been that way. The spear and the arrow extended the arm, the telescope extended the eye, and now the Kissinger kissing device extends the mouth. Every technology we’ve ever made has also altered the way we live”.
Atwood therefore asks us to imagine and choose the lives we want if the future we choose is the one with all of these intelligent and versatile information communication technologies in it.
Marc Kosciejew is head of department and lecturer in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta.