During my time at Silicon Valley, it was extremely strange to see cars go by with no drivers in them, it was jarring to see people walking their robots on the streets, and it was all the more interesting to hear from different coworkers and people that they didn’t really care about those kind of ethics…yet.
I think that’s the difference between a place like Silicon Valley, and a place like home, where there’s a staggering difference in skilled and unskilled labor / jobs. People don’t think about automation until it starts to impact their own jobs.
However, first off, I’d like to address the subject of the Luddites. In the Wikipedia article linked, it informs us that Luddites were originally not against automation itself, but the deceitful use of it. “It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt the progress of technology. Over time, however, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation, or new technologies in general.” I’m conflicted because, automation would get rid of most jobs that most people would honestly never want. There’s a lot of labor jobs that objectively suck, but people have to do it for their own good or their family’s good. So if automation’s profit and benefits truly did apply and raise everyone’s quality of living instead of benefiting a few, then I really do think that automation could be a good thing.
And in terms of AI possibly taking over what most would consider humane jobs, such as caregiving, artistic work, or even life-and-death decisions, it’ll have to be a reflection of what we believe in. There’s a quiz online that forces the user to make difficult life and death decisions in terms of what a car should crash into. It forces us to compare between groups or categorizations of objects and even people. It’s the trolley problem all over again, except with infinite scenarios. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4. (also this kid knows what’s up)
It’s also impossible to believe anything of what articles say about job prospects once automation becomes more commonplace and more applicable to various sectors. There’s always the prospect that it’ll be like some sort of example from the past that either says that automation will create more jobs or will destroy more jobs, but there’s no way to actually tell until we start living through it. And I think not knowing what will happen because we haven’t truly thought about policy or terms with it is the scariest part of all of this.
UBI however has been one approach that’s been hotly talked about. I can’t say it’s viable until the data comes out from different countries currently testing this approach, and seeing what their conclusions may be in terms of their different approaches. The rich will continue to be richer, as they are the ones leading the forefront of automation (big tech companies), but who knows, maybe it’ll all end up as a Wall-E scenario, where everyone ends up doing nothing because automation does everything for them, and maybe…that’s okay. If we all ended up fat, not knowing how to do anything, because there was automation and AI to take care of all our needs, then what’s the point of trying anything. Even though that may be a different debate entirely (and I personally don’t know what to believe in terms of whether that’s truly ethical to believe or not), that’s something we’re going to have to figure out as well.