How Society Should Handle the Displacement of Work by Technology

Image: Royal Caribbean's Bionic Bar 

Let's face it, a lot of people do not like going to work. In fact, only 49% of workers in the United States are satisfied with their job, according to 2016 statistics from Pew Research. However, even if a large swath of the population despises their job, there is a clear reason almost all of us have to do it. That reason is that we have all seen the consequences of what happens when people in our own lives get laid off and when jobs leave a region en masse. Case in point, the second of these scenarios happened in many towns and cities in the Great Lakes region of the United States where problems such as drug addiction, hunger, and poverty have risen after factories closed during the 2000s. 

There were many causes of the decline in factory jobs in this region of the United States during the 2000s. However, one of the reasons job losses have occurred throughout history is due to changes in technology. In fact, with every change in technology throughout history, certain workers have always been displaced. For example, the widespread adoption of electric lamps during the second half of the 19th century meant that there was no longer a need for lamplighters. Meanwhile, the proliferation of new technology allowing people to make calls without the need for a middleman meant that telephone switchboard operators went from being a part of everyday life in the early to mid-20th century to a job that had almost become a relic of the past by turn of the 21st century. In 1961, Unimate, the first industrial robot, was introduced at the now closed Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing, New Jersey. It was put into use in order to transfer freshly cast metal car door handles through the factory line for usage in vehicles manufactured by General Motors, according to an article written by NJ Spotlight News. Robots similar to those found in factories can be found at a few cocktail bars like the Bionic Bar on many Royal Caribbean ships. These robots, including the one pictured at the top of this article, allow for cocktails to be served to patrons without the need for a human bartender. Besides industrial robots displacing many previous existing jobs, the internet has recently had a similar effect with professions such as travel agents, translators, and printing press operators having declined as the usage of the internet has risen, according to an article published by Investopedia.  

One other notable displacing technology is artificial intelligence (AI), which is defined by Oxford Learner's Dictionaries as "The study and development of computer systems that can copy intelligent human behaviour." AI is a diverse field, so different types of AI can be classified based on their differing capabilities. On their website, International Business Machines (IBM), one of the biggest players in the field of AI makes a distinction between Weak AI and Strong AI. Weak AI tends to perform one duty and cannot do anything else. However, Strong AI is AI that is aware of its own existence and possesses a level of intelligence equal to or greater than humans. While Weak AI is very much present in our daily lives in the forms of voice recognition programs like Siri, chat bots on websites to aid in customer service inquiries, and to process data to make decisions for businesses. Weak AI is also used to provide services for consumers such as monitoring credit card fraud, figuring out the types of content one will enjoy on social media and to provide quick translations with a simple internet search, amongst many other things. Meanwhile, Strong AI is still a theoretical concept. 

According to a 2016 study from Oxford University, automation and AI will displace up to 47% of the jobs in the developed world by 2041 in industries as diverse as manufacturing, agriculture, and retail. In particular, jobs in office and administrative support, sales and retail, and production are the most likely to decline in the near future according to information published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2021. Part of the reason why these types of jobs are vulnerable is that secretaries and customer service workers have the potential to be replaced by automated answering services, and retail workers have the potential to be replaced by self-checkout machines. Meanwhile, production has for a while slowly but surely needed fewer and fewer workers as industrial robots like Unimate are able to be utilized for more and more tasks. The fact that so many jobs could be displaced has many far-reaching implications such as its potential to inflict many of the problems faced by de-industrialized communities such as the ones located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States upon an even larger number of regions and communities. Despite the negative consequences of automation, it is also possible that automation will create new opportunities. For example, while the invention of the internet may have displaced jobs for travel agents, it also opened up opportunities for careers that previously did not exist such as mobile app developers, social media managers, and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists. 

  

According to a CNBC article published in 2019, tech billionaire Elon Musk believes that almost all work will eventually become no longer necessary. However, according to most economists, it is unlikely that within our lifetime that we are going to see complete automation of every job and some work will still be needed since people do not really want to see robots acting in a film, for example. However, even with jobs that will not be automated for the foreseeable future, such as data engineers, web developers, athletes, and human resources partners, there will be a greater usage of displacing technologies such as AI to increase efficiency. For example, a human resources officer may use AI to analyze information on the employees at their workplace, while athletes in at least some sports will likely have AI technologies to make some types of calls during games instead of a human referee or umpire. 

  

The effects that displacing technologies have on workers and society at large are not without critics. In a 2022 interview with Boston Magazine, Sean O'Brien, the General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), a union of which I was once a member said, “I’m going to fight hard against autonomous vehicles, especially in the trucking industry. They eliminate jobs, number one, and number two, they’re a public safety risk.” O’Brien mentioned autonomous trucks in particular because his union represents many truck drivers at companies such as UPS, Ryder, Old Dominion, and the Yellow Company, amongst many others. I do not think O'Brien's concerns are unwarranted because his members rely on jobs such as trucking to feed their families and he understands the threat that new technologies pose for them. A transition to a world with fewer jobs required to sustain the needs of our society due to automation also poses several serious problems economically. Chiefly amongst these problems would be income inequality because the owners of companies using these new displacing technologies would reap massive amounts of profits, while the unemployed workers whose jobs have been displaced would no longer have a source of income. Another of these problems is the issue of the safety of some new technologies such as autonomous vehicles. A potential solution for this could be a tax on technology that reduces the need for human labor with the revenues distributed equally amongst the population. This plan would be a form of universal basic income (UBI), which was made famous by 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Candidate and Forward Party founder Andrew Yang. However, my plan would differ from Yang's because his proposal states that every person should receive a fixed amount of money, specifically having proposed $1000 per month. Whereas in my proposal, the amount that every person receives would be based on the revenues generated from the tax on profits from displacing technologies such as self-checkouts, AI, and industrial robots. This principle for deciding how much money every person gets per month resembles the profit sharing done at Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler in North America since the 1980s, in which hourly workers get a share of the companies' profits that depends on how much profit their employer makes.  

Another aspect of how I believe society ought to handle increased automation in the workplace is to have people working less for higher pay. This could be achieved through a number of means such as companies offering earlier retirements or reducing the number of hours employees work in a week but increasing pay. The only obstacle to such a thing happening is that no employer would voluntarily be this generous when our economy is based on companies maximizing profits. Therefore, this solution would require pressure from either labor unions like the IBT or a strong pro-worker government to fulfill.  

In addition to the necessity of good policies at places of work and in our laws to manage the automation of work, O’Brien is right that society also needs to address the question of how to deal with potentially unsafe technologies that displace jobs such as autonomous vehicles. In fact, a 2015 study conducted by the University of Michigan found that even though autonomous vehicles were rarely if ever directly responsible for crashes, they still got into 9.1 crashes per million miles driven. Meanwhile, traditional vehicles got into 4.1 crashes per million miles driven, and crashes with autonomous vehicles and accidents involving autonomous vehicles caused 0.36 injuries per accident on average, compared to 0.25 injuries per accident on average for accidents only involving traditional vehicles. The best solution for this issue is to implement strong regulations to make sure that new technologies in the workplace are safe. A specific regulation that could work for this instance would be for companies to be required to prove to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or another government agency that their products are safer than the technologies they are displacing before being implemented. 

It is difficult to foresee exactly how automation will affect the job market and society. It is certainly possible that certain jobs do not decline as much as current predictions foretell. However, I still believe that if all the ideas I proposed were implemented, they would reduce income inequality and promote safety in a future where many jobs are displaced by new technologies.