by When talking to my peers about the potential of artificial intelligence to displace hundreds of millions of workers in the United States in the next couple years, I often get greeted with a small chuckle. College students often tell me that I am worried about the wrong things and we should focus more on things such as climate change, racial inequalities, and health care disparities. Indeed, I think these current issues are important, but I believe that we must start a serious political discourse of how machine learning and artificial intelligence will completely change our lives– just as electricity and the internet did. In my opinion, I believe that the integration of artificial intelligence will lead to a job loss that we will not be prepared for unless we distribute the wealth of the largest technology companies to every American.
In 2017, Asian-American presidential candidate Andrew Yang began campaigning about the issue of job loss due to automation. His campaign started in the Midwest where, over the last five years, around 5 million factory worker and automation jobs were displaced due to machines. Of those people, the United States has one of the worst retraining programs for a 1st world country and only around 20% of these displaced workers were retrained for other low skill jobs– which would ALSO be displaced by AI or automation in the next couple of years. What will we even do when self-driving vehicles replace truck drivers– which is the most common job in over half of the states next to retail workers? What jobs will they replace? Indeed, the American foundation of capitalism is being completely destroyed as we now see that companies that progress innovation do not create more jobs. In 1979, General Motors employed around 800,000 workers and made around $11 billion dollars. In 2012, Google made 1.5 times the revenue while employing 14 times less people. However, some would argue that the internet itself eventually solves this problem because it created new industries that were not available before its creation. However, the creation of new industries still does not account for the same as the creation of new jobs. In 2004, blockbuster had 80,000 employees and made $6 billion while today, Netflix has 4000 employees but makes twice the amount. A similar example to use is the ratio of efficiency and job creation through the internet. A YouTube channel with 12 employees has over 13 million subscribers and averages over 5 million views per video. A similar news network using cast members, make-up crew, and production managers would have to expend hundreds more people in order to get the same number of views. In this sense, we could argue that the creation of these internet platforms allows a wider platform to be reached with less people required to do work– hence less jobs.
With automation destroying the number of jobs, how about AI? Is it really as bad as it seems? People that argue AI will never displace jobs such as consulting, medicine, law and other specialized jobs are completely incorrect. In fact, a form of AI called machine learning is happening at this very moment. If you look up any project management software used in big corporations, their primary purpose is to eliminate unnecessary middle management positions. When a new project is inputted into the system, the software divides jobs into ones it can do by itself(which are immediately eliminated) and those that need actual humans. The software then sends out messages to compile and recruit free lancers across the internet to do the given job. The software gives the tasks to the workers and tracks the quality and performance until the task is completed. While this is happening, the software uses machine learning to train itself to learn how those specific tasks are completed by the free lancers. Basically, the workers are training the software on how to replace them. Companies can do this because in a large corporation that employees hundreds, if not thousands of workers, project management software cuts the costs of pay by 50% the first year and 25% the second year.
Will the future be a small minority of the rich that control the machines? I do not hope so but I think we can mitigate the probability of that occurring by redistributing the wealth that these corporations gain from gaining access to our data and information. We should really be worried about how capitalism will work in the United States in a time where many jobs today will cease to exist.
SOURCES:
The Rise of the Robots: http://amzn.to/2sFQTed
The Second Machine Age: http://amzn.to/2szATee