During his quarantine in Beijing, Kai-Fu Lee had his food delivered by a ‘wheeled creature resembling R2D2’. While the end of the COVID-crisis does not seem in sight for most of the world, China is already thinking about a post-COVID world. Kai-Fu Lee explains in this article how he has seen immense strides when it comes to automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in China, and how the rest of the world is likely to follow. While the shift in online businesses, automation and algorithms began before COVID, the crisis has accelerated it. He elaborates how historically, economic difficulties result in maturing technologies, as companies have to cut costs and automation is often the way to do so. Not only in manufacturing, but with many white-collar employees working from home and everything happening online – and thus translated into data – the step for robots and AI to take over is not that large, according to Lee. Everything that can be automated in a cost-effective manner will be, not merely for profit but for health as well as safety. Especially in a pandemic where frontline workers are at a huge risk, it would be better for robots to do menial and dangerous tasks, says Lee.
While he admits that automation may change and even decimate jobs, Lee assures us that new jobs will be created. The points he alludes to in this article are similar to some of the arguments Igor Shoikhedbrod has laid out in his journal article. Lee mentions the need for us to reimagine work sectors, and suggests that it is up to public and private sectors to lead this change; they should find ways to retrain and repurpose those workers most at risk of having their jobs become obsolete. Shoikhedbrod argues that AI will transform the ways in which humans experience work, and emphasises the need for us to think about – and thus reimagine – the value of work.
The value of work is something that has been discussed widely. Shoikhedbrod discusses several meanings, comparing the value we have nowadays to the one that we have seen in literature. Supposedly, nowadays the wages we receive for the work we perform reflects the scarcity and demand of skills in the market.
Shoikhedbrod draws on Aristotle and Kant to explain what he means by ‘value’, and it is interesting to note that both philosophers give two definitions that are quite similar: one has to do with monetary worth, and the other has to do with dignity or how well something satisfies human needs. This relates to Lee’s points of cost-effectiveness as a driver for AI, as it shows that the value our labour has had so far is of a monetary kind; which Kant suggested is replaceable. It is important to mark, though, that Kant has also claimed that humans can not be classified as having monetary value because we have moral value, which makes us priceless.
This brings us to the value of work. In Shoikhedbrod’s research he points out Marx’ finding of inconsistencies in Kant’s work; how labour can have monetary (and thus replaceable) value, but how humans can also have a certain formal right and therefore dignity. He suggested that the most harmful and mundane forms of labour could be automated, leaving room for emancipated humans to fulfil necessary freedom-enabling activities. What this means in relation to the examples in Lee’s article, is that while the healthcare bot will be grinding through diagnoses, the human will have the time to communicate with patients. Or in the example of education, while the tutor bot provides information and teaches the students, the human can enjoy the fulfilling experience of guiding students to their end goals.
I believe that the implications of AI are extremely complex, and I agree with both authors that there is a need to revalue the meaning of work to prevent us becoming obsolete. The idea to retrain people in sectors at risk of being automated good, but considering the current value of work is monetary and for us to survive, I believe that this retraining should be endorsed both by the public and private sector, as Lee suggested. Especially during the pandemic, as Shoikhedbrod emphasises, it has become extremely clear that the future of work is political and that the impact differs across demographics.
In my opinion, the implementation of AI is very risky, as it is often low-paying jobs where people are most vulnerable to a missing paycheck. There are reasons to believe that getting rid of these kinds of jobs is good, because the jobs may be dangerous (manufacturing) or because the workers are being exploited (delivery drivers). However, these jobs are essential to these people, and unless they get a chance to work in different jobs that can’t be replaced by bots, the implementation of AI will only be adding to inequality. Worrisome from that perspective, is that AI has a bias. Created by a majority demographic – whether that be Han Chinese or white people in the West – AI poses a great risk to minorities. This gets more complicated when we look at said political nature of the future of work, as regulations around the implementation of AI often are not put in place in the best interest of minorities.
AI also involves data. Where Lee suggests the rest of the world will follow and see China as an example the way the West has seen America as an example, I have some doubts. In the race to eliminate COVID, many countries set up apps to track cases and follow a line of contagion. In countries like China, they were adopted seamlessly, whereas in other countries like the UK or the Netherlands, these apps carried a lot of controversy as people are afraid their data might fall into the wrong hands. The same applies for the introduction of 5G needed for some AI devices like self-driving cars. In the West there is a scepticism and even Sinophobia around it, so seeing China in an idolized position is an unlikely scenario to me.
However, this will likely only slow the implementation of automation and AI by governments and the public sector. I suspect the private sector will remain focused on evolving into more cost-effective means, out of fear of being disadvantaged against China from a market perspective. As a result, I expect it will not be long before jobs will be further replaced by these kinds of bots, with all its consequences. We can only hope that the value of work will be revalued and the value of humans will be re-politicised to save our jobs from being decimated before we have the ability to repurpose ourselves for the better.
References:
Lee, K., 2020. Kai-Fu Lee On How Covid Spurs China’s Great Robotic Leap Forward, The Economist [link]
Shoikhedbrod, I., 2020. Revaluing and Re-Politicizing Work in the Age of Automation and AI. C4E Journal [link]
I find your post interesting because it highlights so clearly the operations of a work society. While reading this post, I was struck by the fact that the most common response to fears about automation is “don’t worry, you will still be able to work”; rather than “don’t worry, you will still be able to live!” Which brings to mind a quote from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.” That right there is the work society. I also appreciate your engagement with the two registers of value – how the confinement of labour as economic value conflicts with the innate moral value (dignity) that humans are supposed to have. This, too, seems to provide a clear impetus for society to be agitating for a liberation from work. Given these arguments, I think you are right in suggesting a need to repoliticise the human – but why as a means of saving jobs rather than as a means of saving, or reclaiming, life?