What is the purpose of automation? Is it to make our lives easier? Is it to make our lives more meaningful? Is it to increase the scope of our lives? While some may naively hope that the above are true, that automation makes our lives easier by reducing our work, more meaningful by eliminating mundane tasks, or expanded by allowing specialization, in reality, automation does the exact opposite.
Enter Humans Need Not Apply, a video emphasizing the true effects that automation has already brought. That’s right, the negative effects of automation are already visible. Just like Sherry Turkle has lived through the realization of the “global village” that used to be nothing more than an abstraction, we are experiencing the rise of automation, an endeavor to replace humans with more efficient, more cost-effective, more loyal mechanical machines, and, soon ,mechanical minds.
People used to assume that jobs requiring brainpower (researchers, professionals, and even engineers) would be safe from the simplistic metallic arms built to assemble other simple machines while remaining oblivious to the world. However, artificial intelligence has been entering our lives more and more, able to sense the world, able to change the world. Newer systems are designed to teach themselves how to do certain tasks, meaning little to no effort must be done by the programmers; just show a bot a task and watch it get to work. Furthermore, there are systems being developed specifically to create other AI and software, replacing even the programmers behind the phenomenon, forever changing the way work is done, changing the way we do work, changing our world.
A connection was made in the video between our situation and that of horses. Following mechanical muscles (mainly cars), horses were unemployable; few jobs today can be filled by a horse. This phenomenon applies to humans too. Already humans have been replaced by machines in industries requiring physical labor, leaving them with two options: remain unemployed or specialize. The former is no good, and there is a significant problem with the latter: we simply cannot push such a large portion of the population through higher education (if they even want to) and find jobs for them. Jobs that are soon to be replaced anyways.
Yes, automation frees people from working on a task, but what does that really mean? Because of automation, are we able to abandon our work, pursue our interests, and have faith that society will continue to develop? In other words, is automation democratic? No. It is authoritarian. Machines dictate what jobs we can perform. Machines dictate who gets to have a job. Machines dictate who gets to survive while the others are left unemployable, left to be “exterminated” in the words of Mumford.
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