Automation scares me!
The definition of progress has been shifting, it’s one of the introductory subject matters of sociology, economics and political science, but we are yet to agree of a definition. But we can surely chalk unsustainable mindless growth out as a singular parameter of welfare and prosperity.
Dear readers,
It’s been a long time I have last written a post on this platform. I was still not over my anger with Medium that they cancelled the edit option from the mobile app. It stills keeps me in the shade about the future of this platform. But this not the only thing that is been on my mind.
The year 2022, made the fault lines in our democracies clear. It also made clear how our society still depends on notion of endless growth to be an indicator of human progress and is heavily influenced by oil and fossil fuels. Environmentalism and Climate justice came to the frontline of political agenda and issues.
Democracy is having a tragic fall, and with it is faltering the hopes of millions of people worldwide. Democracy is the link between the battle for greater equality and a mean to achieve this multi dimensional justice. But it has been simmered down to a system to please the wealthy and to repress the poor, to keep them happy with hoax and false promises of mobility and justice, and also about their religion, while the world rages in wildfires and financial slowdown. Entire Islands are submerging under water and we care about petty differences in human appearance or ethnicity or social criteria. Communal forces are kept alive to carry forward communal hatred and presence of religious fundamentalism and extremism, which is a threat to secularism. Caste based reservation is also supported in name of compensation, while it only increases the animosity between the groups and increases hate crime, while affirmative action based on social criteria should be implemented.
Though I am getting shifted from my focus, I shall keep this article short. My agenda is to share my understanding of democratization and growth agents in an economy and how automation is scary to me.
Growth in the economy
Several economic research have been made in endogenous and exogenous growth models and two leading theories are status seeking behaviour in society and also innovation. The only link in between these two rather inconsistent theories is entrepreneurship. Those who seek status can do so in a equal society, where barriers to social mobility is low and ease of investing in ventures is adequate. But status seeking people distribute their wealth into positional luxury items who have little value in terms of efficiency or necessity. Status seeking people seems to divert resources away from innovation, and use their influence to stop innovation from taking place, because creative destruction or schumpterian growth can lead to isolation of old technology and loss of status for them. So this innovation must take place in new firms. But the current world neither redistributes wealth, nor is it equal, there’s a lot of discouragement against entrepreneurial thinking and existing powerful families hold majority of power, fame and wealth, and they are the decisive factor in terms of innovation. Moreover the funds for the investment in Medium and Small Scale enterprises is mismanaged and not reaped for its benefits. We see women fighting for their rights, but not many women are free enough or education enough to exercise their rights or to work or to do business or to even make decisions in matters involving them. It’s this equality and the equal society that is conducive to growth. Because new firms would employ people and increase employment, something the world needs very much right now. Employment alone doesn’t solve the multidimensional problem of poverty and social injustice which now involves it’s paradigms like energy costs, education and health care expenses, housing, environmental threats, natural calamities and also class struggle and in many places geopolitical and socioeconomic tensions. A poor person is not poor because of personal choice, they are poor because of poor decisions and public policy. We are heavily inclined towards wasting the Earths biosphere and natural resources to feed our ever growing hunger for material wealth, a society must thrive and try to think post growth. We would run out of natural resources otherwise, it time to think redistributive and ecological, and to boost sustainable growth that ensures sustenance of healthy social democracy. There’s an even more imminent crisis, bigger than unemployment, that is unemployablity. This brings me to the next segment of this article.
Hyperautomation and the future of work
The current frenzy around CHAT-GPT3, the viral transformer model which is taking the world by storm is just a teaser of what is yet to come, and it’s won’t be in the form of Chat-GPT, or Dall-E, or DeepAI for that case, it would rather be in form of the dreaded hyperautomation. The future of work is not only gig economy, or do what you like, or WFH, it’s going to be automated by AI. AI already dons a lot of arena of our lives, from recommending us movies and songs, to virtual making us sublime to it’s decisions, and feedback loops to keep us hooked to our devices and to create a persona for us and to do the job of critical thinking for us. If it rationally be thought, winds aren’t free too, but the concept of free, or justice aren’t reflexes we inherit, rather these are learned and unlocked through realisation. We need to think critically and make decisions for ourselves. I won’t be a doomer, AI is gonna help us alot for tech to prosper and to put it to sustainable purposes, to help give businesses better insights and also higher security, to analyse big data and draw meaningful insights to better standard of living, and to improve the economic output of various sectors from agriculture to industry. The future of work and the type of labour deemed useful would change drastically, manual labour, and jobs requiring more physical work would shrink in size. 10% of jobs are fully automable and over 50% jobs in the market are partially autonomous. Jobs requiring extreme expertise, consulting or requiring sense of ethics and involving emotions heavily are at much lower risk. 15% of the global workforce is under threat of losing their means of livelihood and 50% of the global workforce needs to be upskilled. 83 million jobs shall be lost, but 90 million shall be created according to surveys and models. But how many people are ready to hop onto these jobs? There has been a decline in upskilling people and they are left on their own. If only new and innovative firms can employ and train people to generate both wealth and prosperity, they are forbidden from defying the structure by industry leaders. There’s an environmental cost to this wave of hyperautomation too. Moreover a robot taxation must be devised to provide a basic income program for the people who lost their livelihoods. A lot of good can be done but its benefit must reach everyone equitably. It’s time we look beyond domination and transcend the boundaries to unite people and acts towards the greater equality. This would cause another wave of unemployment and huge tech divide that would be far reaching and would also cause intergenerational backwardness amongst the weak segments of the society. The current innovations and changes are taking place in already entrenched and established enterprises, which makes it even tougher for new players to enter the market. See how it’s all connected?
Social democracy’s — only goal is to generate wealth, but to democratise power and redistribute wealth equitably amongst all, and to uphold social and ecological justice. It’s time to accelerate the march towards sustainability, innovation, equality and partnership, than be slaves to the next array of machines that shall stir the next industrial revolution.
I’m not standing in this battlefield to win or to bring people to war. I’m here to leave the message that there is a voice still left. There’s someone who opposes this conversion of human beings to machines, and snatching their rights and attacking the temple of humanity and it’s divine duty to serve justice. Hope I could bring my points to light and this was an insightful write up. Thanks for reading, it’s been great to have been writing for everyone on this platform and the web. And we are now at a count of 293 I guess already.
Let’s transit to unity, love, peace, tolerance, coexistence and Humanity for the sake of equality and sustenance.
All the best to everyone who wishes to make tech accessible to all, and create social change that revolutionises people and livelihood, not to rule but to love.
