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Artificial Intelligence era: What we will do when robots can do anything

Work is a constant in most of our lives – but it is changing as never before. Artificial intelligence that could automate most jobs already exists. While opinions differ about the likely impacts and what society’s response should be, one thing is sure: the deep influence of work on the human psyche means all of us will feel the effects.

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- Can machines take our jobs without ruining our lives?

Models, cooks, managers, lawyers – artificial intelligence is capable of doing a widening array of our jobs. But maybe that’s not all bad

John Maynard Keynes always assumed that robots would take our jobs. According to the British economist, writing in 1930, it was all down to “our means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”. And that was no bad thing. Our working week would shrink to 15 hours by 2030, he reckoned, with the rest of our time spent trying to live “wisely, agreeably and well”.

It hasn’t happened like that – indeed, if anything many of us are working more than we used to. Advanced economies that have seen large numbers of manual workers displaced by automation have generally found employment for them elsewhere, for example in service jobs. The question is whether that can continue, now that artificial intelligence is turning its hand to all manner of tasks beyond the mundane and repetitive.

Fear of machines taking jobs dates back at least as far as the Luddites, a group of British weavers who went on a mill-burning rampage in 1811 when power looms made them redundant. Two centuries on, many of us could face the same predicament. In 2013 Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford looked at 702 types of work and ranked them according to how easy it would be to automate them. They found that just under half of all jobs in the US could feasibly be done by machines within two decades.

The list included jobs such as telemarketers and library technicians. Not far behind were less obviously susceptible jobs, including models, cooks and construction workers, threatened respectively by digital avatars, robochefs and prefabricated buildings made in robot factories. The least vulnerable included mental health workers, teachers of young children, clergy and choreographers. In general, jobs that fared better required strong social interaction, original thinking and creative ability, or very specific fine motor skills of the sort demonstrated by dentists and surgeons.

Others find that list overblown. A recent working paper for the rich world OECD club suggests that AI will not be able to do all the tasks associated with all these jobs – particularly the parts that require human interaction – and only about 9 per cent of jobs are fully automatable. What’s more, past experience shows that jobs tend to evolve around automation.

According to this more Keynesian view, technological progress will continue to improve our lives. The most successful innovations are those that complement rather than usurp us, says Ben Shneiderman, who founded the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland. Witness for instance the prominence of “cobots” at the 2015 annual automation expo in Chicago. Such robots are designed to work alongside people, making their work safer and easier, not replacing them. “Technologies are most effective when their designs amplify human abilities,” says Shneiderman. They could help us solve problems, communicate widely, or create art, music and literature, he believes.

The weight of expert opinion is behind him. In 2014 the Pew Research Center, a US think tank, asked 1896 experts whether they thought that by 2025, technology would have destroyed more jobs than it creates. The optimists outnumbered the pessimists.

That’s not to deny that AI is spreading into some surprising settings – whether it be organising nightly maintenance on Hong Kong’s subway system, or helping out with subtle legal research, as does ROSS, an AI assistant built on IBM’s Watson computer. This suggests that AI could still cause short-term turbulence in the labour market.

One unfolding example is the gig economy. Here AI systems serve up a platter of casual labour to a convenient app for consumers. Examples include the taxi firm Uber and outfits like TaskRabbit, which helps people find casual labourers to complete all sorts of chores. Although the gig economy is still small in absolute terms, a recent study of 1 million people who bank with JP Morgan Chase suggested that the number of people getting some of their income from the gig economy has increased tenfold in two years.

In such set-ups, workers are typically considered self-employed contractors, so the company has no obligation to keep supplying work or provide benefits like holiday pay or pensions. That has already led to strikes.

How can we adapt? The answer might simply be to update our social frameworks to reflect the new reality of work. Many countries are considering new regulatory frameworks for the gig economy. In the US Uber and Lyft, another taxi service, face ongoing lawsuits about the classification of drivers as contractors rather than employees. Drivers may vote with their wheels, too: Transunion Car Service, established in New Jersey in 2015, is an Uber-like taxi business owned by its drivers that promises health and retirement benefits.

Others are thinking more radically about how to reconfigure our whole relationship with work. That speaks to an important point: ultimately we, not AI, are in charge of our own destiny. Given the benefits of work for our health and well-being, maybe we’ll opt not to abolish fulfilling, rewarding work. “There will be inequities and disruptions, but that’s been going on for hundreds of years,” says Shneiderman. “The question is: is the future human-centred? I say it is.”

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- What happens if we pay everyone just to live?

Think universal basic income is a pipe dream? Experiments all over the world are already showing its potential to transform society for the better

Each month, Nathalie Kuskoff repeats the process that ensures her family’s security. Her two young children both have chronic illnesses, so their apartment in southern Finland is mostly paid for by the government, which also helps with childcare, medical bills and education. “I get a lot of different social benefits because of my situation – I mean a lot,” she says. They come at a price: relentless form-filling.

Most developed economies have some form of welfare state to redistribute wealth from the economically active to those who are unemployed or can’t work. People differ about who they think should get what, but few dispute the principle of a basic safety net.

But as Kuskoff and many others find, welfare on the basis of need is a cumbersome, bureaucratic affair. And as automation continues its march, many more of us may find ourselves caught in its net. This is the background to a radical idea to rejig the way we distribute welfare that has recently been in the headlines: universal basic income.

At its simplest, the premise is to replace welfare with a contract promising everyone the same money unconditionally, covering basic human needs – food, shelter, clothing – which people can add to by working. Its proponents cite an array of advantages including higher employment, better community cohesion and improved health. Others see it as an excuse to shirk. Now, as the debate rages, several huge social experiments could settle these differences.

Universal basic income has a long history. Thomas Paine, a US founding father, believed that natural resources were a common heritage and that landowners sitting on them should be taxed and the income redistributed. While the idea has never fully materialised, neither has it entirely gone away. In a few corners of the world variants are discreetly part of the furniture. In Alaska, for example, an annual dividend from state oil revenues is paid to citizens each year – a windfall of $2072 per person in 2015.

The idea has been gaining adherents across the political spectrum. In the UK, for example, proponents include the left-wing Green party and a right-wing think tank, the Adam Smith Institute. The main opposition Labour party is also toying with the idea. In Canada, testing the approach forms part of the policy platform of the Liberal party, elected to government in 2015.

Licence to laze

The perceived threat of automation is a timely spur to revisiting universal basic income, but it isn’t the only one. First, conventional welfare systems are not just bureaucratic but also costly. Even though basic income pays out more money, it cuts the costs of red tape. Various schemes have been proposed that look affordable, including one in 2015 from the RSA, a UK think tank. Basic income also promises to eliminate financial disincentives to work that bedevil many welfare systems – under a basic income system, you always earn more if you work.

The most entrenched criticism is that too many would exploit a guaranteed income to sit on their hands, grinding the economy to a halt. There are signs, though, that this is too gloomy a view.

For four years beginning in 1975, the 10,000 citizens of Dauphin in Manitoba, Canada, were guaranteed a basic level of financial security: if their monthly income dropped below a certain level, the government would top it up. Support for this experiment soon dried up, and it was never properly analysed.

Evelyn Forget at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg recently revisited the experiment, comparing public records from Dauphin with those from similar small towns. Forget found the only groups that spent less time in work during the trial were teenage boys and new mothers. The boys were staying in school rather than bowing to pressure to take agricultural jobs, and the mothers were nursing. What’s more, Dauphin had noticeably lower hospitalisation rates and fewer depression-related illnesses.

That was just one small-town trial. But in Alaska, experience suggests that a basic income could help reduce the rising inequality that has been hobbling world economies. Economist Scott Goldsmith at the University of Alaska Anchorage points out that the state is the only one in the US in which the income of the poorest 20 per cent grew faster than that of the top 20 per cent between the 1980s and 2000.

Now experiments are afoot to test such effects more exactingly. One, in Finland, is one of the grandest social experiments ever conceived, says social scientist Jurgen De Wispelaere at the University of Tampere. “There’s nothing like it happening anywhere.” Starting in 2017, as many as 10,000 Finns will get a no-strings-attached monthly income of €600 for two years. That sum is designed to guarantee subsistence, says Ville-Veikko Pulkka of Finland’s social insurance department Kansaneläkelaitos (Kela), covering housing, food and services like water and electricity.

Kela will publish the full trial design in November, but the point is to test whether a basic income gets more people working. “Removing disincentives to joining the labour force is the key task given to us by government,” says Pulkka. The ideal is to give people a platform to enter the labour market on their own terms.

In Finland, that taps into a well-anchored social principle called universalism: that the same services and education should be available to everyone. “At some level, people want to believe in this system,” says Pulkka. Kuskoff would certainly be interested in participating. “Getting the money without all the paperwork sounds like heaven,” she says.

Reducing bureaucracy is the driver of a similar large-scale experiment kicking off in the Netherlands in 2017. It started when the Dutch government passed a law giving municipalities the responsibility for administering welfare. Their staff baulked at taking on the job of continually vetting welfare applicants as the central government had been doing. “People realised this was going to do their heads in and they needed to change it,” says De Wispelaere.

Nineteen municipalities are now changing how they administer welfare payments, says Sjir Hoeijmakers, who is coordinating the experiments. Each will test different supposed benefits of a basic income like those Forget flagged in Dauphin. In Eindhoven, for example, the focus is on whether the changes help build strong neighbourhoods, while other municipalities are concentrating on randomised controlled trials to determine how individuals fare. A certain amount of freeloading is expected, says De Wispelaere: “In any policy you have good and bad. We want to know how many people move to the couch, and then compare the positive effects.”

Private companies are also getting in on the act. Y Combinator, a venture capital firm with stakes in the taxi app Uber, has announced that it will run a basic income experiment, with a pilot phase slated to begin in Oakland, California.

The most important arguments in favour of basic income are about improved health and well-being, says Louise Haagh, a social economist at the University of York, UK. These too are now coming under more scrutiny. For example, a study of 1000 children by Kimberly Noble of Columbia University in New York found a strong positive correlation between family income and brain development. One theory is that families with a secure income can focus extra resources on their children. “But with purely correlational data we can’t say which way the arrow is pointing,” says Noble.

To find out, she is now running an experiment in which 1000 low-income mothers across the US will receive a basic income for three years. One group will receive a nominal $20 a month, the other $333. Noble’s focus is on brain development, not economics, but a pilot study in New York in which money was handed out on trackable, prepaid debit cards suggested freeloading wasn’t a problem: of 1100 transactions, most of the money went on groceries. Just three happened at a liquor store.

So is a basic income a panacea? Some, like Kuskoff, who have special care needs, worry that such a system might push them to a harsher edge of the welfare state in the name of homogenisation and efficiency. And Haagh thinks that a half-hearted implementation might entrench, not dissolve, social inequalities by offering rich and poor the same. Governments could end up subsidising companies that give few or no benefits to their workforces, while the lucky few with more conventional employment receive far more. The problem is that a poorly designed basic income “might not end up changing society that much”, says Haagh.

Other variants do exist. Negative income tax is a means-tested version of universal basic income: poor people receive a guaranteed income from the government, middle earners aren’t taxed, while the rich are.

It sounds fairer, but could have a significant disadvantage, as the work of Silvia Avram at the University of Essex, UK, hints. She recently asked people to perform a tedious task to earn money under different taxation models. The participants were divided into two groups. One group started with a lump sum that was reduced as they earned – much as would happen under a negative income tax – while the others were taxed as they earned. Both groups ended up with the same money for a given amount of work, but the first group was far quicker to quit the task, suggesting that a well-documented human tendency to loss aversion was kicking in: we are wired to place more importance on minimising losses on what we already have than realising gains of the same value.

For Anthony Painter, director of policy and strategy at the RSA, and author of its report on how basic income could work in the UK, it is an indication that negative income tax wouldn’t be as effective at getting people into work as a basic income. Painter and others also think a basic income could benefit society in other ways, freeing up people to look after older relatives and children, or to pursue creative and innovative work that traditionally pays less, like music, arts and invention.

Such supposed whole-society benefits aren’t easy to test objectively, and that might be the most crucial point. If the referendum on basic income that took place in Switzerland on 5 June is any indication, basic income has a long way to go to gain public acceptance. During the debate, triggered when a group of citizens collected more than the necessary 100,000 signatures for a vote on such constitutional change, no political party endorsed the idea: it was widely seen as indulging shirkers. In the end, 77 per cent of voters rejected it.

However, basic-income campaigners were celebrating that evening, saying their objective was to get people talking. The conversation continues. Maybe the mark of ultimate success for the proponents of universal income, says Hoeijmakers, will be if at parties the unfashionable question “what do you do?” morphs into: “why do you do?”.

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