RUTH SUNDERLAND: Will AI steal our jobs, and what will work will be like?
When Bill Winters, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, used the term ‘lower-value human capital’ to describe colleagues he is about to sack and replace with AI, he hit a very tender nerve.
He has since apologised. But whether artificial intelligence will steal our jobs, and what work will be like for those of us who still have a job, are the biggest questions we should be asking ourselves: now, before our futures are irrevocably shaped by a handful of stupendously rich tech tycoons.
The British public is worried. Nearly 60 per cent fear AI will cause widespread unemployment, according to King’s College London. More than one in five believe this will cause civil unrest.
The stock response from the corporate world is that we should not dread the rise of the bots. They will do all the boring, unpleasant work, which presumably includes mining for asteroids on Mars for Elon Musk, while we humans are free to lead lovely lives of leisure. The reality is more complicated.
AI, according to a fascinating article published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), is not making people’s lives easier and more satisfying, but intensifying their workloads and piling on pressure.
The HBR piece describes a deep study over eight months at a tech company in the US with 200 employees. It found that AI was inducing them to work faster and take on more tasks.
Nothing to fear: We should not dread the rise of the bots – they will do all the boring, unpleasant work
Professional boundaries grew fuzzy, with people venturing into areas that previously were the domain of colleagues, sometimes without being asked, simply because AI made it seem possible. Product managers started to write code, researchers began dabbling in engineering.
This blurring of roles and competencies meant more multitasking, more juggling – and more risk, as a veneer of proficiency bestowed by AI is not a substitute for genuine capability. Pity the poor managers expected to supervise it all.
Even the occupants of the boardroom may find the value of their human capital depreciates rapidly in the face of AI, just as it has further down the corporate food chain.
If a bot can do complex scenario planning and make difficult decisions, why pay a fortune to the CEO?
History tells us that technological innovation in the long run creates more jobs than it destroys. The World Economic Forum predicts AI will generate twice as many, and it might be right. But the speed and scale of the AI revolution is such that history may not tell us anything useful this time.
The idea of work itself becoming redundant goes back to Thomas More’s Utopia. And Oscar Wilde thought humanity would one day be ‘simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight’ while machines do all the work.
Heavyweight economists have had similar thoughts.
John Maynard Keynes wrote in a 1930 essay entitled Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren that advances in productivity would have resulted by now in a 15-hour working week. Keynes didn’t have any grandchildren, and we are still waiting for the extra free time.
Whether more leisure is a good thing depends on how it is used. Would we really spend our time contemplating beauty as Wilde envisaged, or would more of us turn into socially useless lumps, glued to daytime TV?
Musk has suggested handing out a high income to everyone, so that money would become irrelevant and having a job could be ‘kinda like a hobby’.
Easier to say when you’re probably going to be the world’s first trillionaire than when you’re a bank employee about to be fired by Standard Chartered.
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