(2019-08-07) The Threat Of Automation Is A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The Threat Of Automation Is A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The production difficulties for the Tesla Model 3 are well-known, and form part of Elon Musk’s reputation as a visionary who sets overly ambitious goals that nonetheless inch us into the future. Beyond the insanity of the targets themselves, however, came poor management decisions that stemmed from Musk’s overestimation of automation

this result echoed GM’s failed 1980s attempt at automation

Beyond corporate risks, bad implementation of automation has jeopardized lives, as evidenced by the two crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8

The automation adopted by Tesla and Boeing appears comparatively low-tech compared to the kinds of automation promised by narratives of artificial intelligence and technological unemployment

Faith in the power of AI nonetheless persists. Any failure is branded as a short-term problem that will eventually be overcome

This conflation of what AI “may one day do” with the much more mundane “what software can do today” creates a powerful narrative around automation that accepts no refutation.

The threat of automation has been present since the industrial age

Despite this, the number of jobs available to humans continued to increase, even as old ones disappeared.

there is nonetheless a belief that a significant amount of labor can be displaced by what exists

In 2013, an Oxford Martin study predicted that 47% of U.S. jobs would be susceptible to automation from technologies like artificial intelligence

The approach used to find these numbers is sorely wanting

The complex ways that tasks interact in a person’s workday are lost.

With the introduction of the automated teller machine (ATM) and other machines like money counters and bank software, it might be expected that these jobs would disappear. Bank telling has in fact grown rapidly as an occupation, shifting its task away from accounting to customer service, resulting from a dynamic in which ATMs vastly increased productivity, while reducing spatial requirements for operating banks

There’s also the belief among technologists, investors, journalists, and policy-makers that there is a large underclass that does not have valuable skills, whereas they are truly productive and vital to society. A Universal Basic Income is necessary to talk about now because even if jobs are not disappearing due to automation and cognitive stratification, they inevitably will, and the unskilled of the world may become fed up with the system if elites fail to buy their silence.

Underneath this narrative that reinforces a dichotomy between productive and unproductive classes is a reality of human labor being completely discounted, which undervalues it in future decision-making.

most “innovative” enterprises don’t like discussing their reliance on human work, even on nominally automated tasks.

“paradox of automation’s last mile.” If a system is nearly perfect, it raises the demand for the service, which in turn raises the demand for humans to correct its mistakes.

Sometimes businesses don’t even bother with AI at all beyond using the rhetoric as a marketing trick to pull in investors and media attention. London-based investment firm MMC Ventures found that out of the 2,830 startups they identified as being “AI-focused” in Europe, 40% used no machine learning tools whatsoever.

This exuberance over artificial intelligence is not actually automating work, as much as it is making it more precarious. Beyond Mechanical Turk and UHRS, we also see the rise of the “gig economy,” which erodes the labor protections that once existed

This preference for the mythical powers of capital over labor creates an incentive for managers to reframe existing jobs in such a way that their automation potential increases

Some clear downsides arise from devaluing the experience of workers and attempting to make their labor digestible for machines. Tesla and Boeing have already learned the hard way. There is a value to the tacit knowledge of human workers, whose understanding of their particular job roles go beyond pure metrics, and are hard to quantify

Continued growth in the analytics industry, if done in a way that capitalizes on management naiveté, encourages poor decisions.

Alternative Visions For Automation

Breaking away from this narrative is not about coloring it with hope. The calls for Fully Automated Luxury Communism have an even more naive approach to new technologies, and one that discounts the true value of human labor to an even greater degree.