{"id":25490,"date":"2023-03-29T17:00:10","date_gmt":"2023-03-29T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencefocus.com\/?p=140608"},"modified":"2023-03-29T17:38:38","modified_gmt":"2023-03-29T15:38:38","slug":"how-ai-is-about-to-change-your-job-and-not-for-the-better","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/rss_feed\/how-ai-is-about-to-change-your-job-and-not-for-the-better\/","title":{"rendered":"How AI is about to change your job \u2013 and not for the better"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not AI that is the issue, it’s the underlying socioeconomic system that needs to change. <\/p>

By Dr Kate Darling\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Wednesday, 29 March 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

\n\n

In early 2023, shortly after ChatGPT<\/a> was released, a freelance writer named Jason Colavito posted on social media<\/a> that a client was replacing him with artificial intelligence<\/a> (AI), because it could write content for free. But the client also wanted to hire Colavito \u2013 at a fraction of his normal rate \u2013 to \u2018rewrite\u2019 the AI-generated text in different words.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time that technology has slashed salaries instead of jobs, and the real problem is not AI. The problem is a culture that devalues human labour.<\/p>\n

With the release of new AI applications, discussions about the future of work are resurging in full force. Will robots<\/a> take all of our jobs? A recent study<\/a> looked at professions in the United States, from poets to financial managers, predicting that 19 per cent will soon lose 50 per cent of their tasks to AI. But our previous experience with automation suggests it\u2019s much more complicated than technology simply replacing human work.<\/p>\n

In 2019, independent research organisation Data & Society studied how automation is being integrated<\/a> in farm management and grocery stores. Counter to the popular belief that the technology was reducing the need for human labour, researchers Alexandra Mateescu<\/a> and Dr Madeleine Clare Elish<\/a> discovered that introducing new devices was mostly changing the nature of the work.<\/p>\n

For example, automated check-out machines kept employees busy, because now they were assisting confused customers, troubleshooting machines and taking on other tasks to ensure their smooth operation in the store.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, Mateescu and Elish discovered that the new tasks, which helped accommodate and implement the \u2018automated\u2019 technology, were often undervalued or even invisible.<\/p>\n

Writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor calls this phenomenon \u2018fauxtomation\u2019. In her article The Automation Charade<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> she points to lost jobs and cut salaries where technology is introduced, despite the fact that people are still doing work around the machines.<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s the customer scanning their own biscuits at self-checkout, or the employee saving a robot that\u2019s stuck in the parking lot, the new work is often deskilled, declared less valuable or made unpaid entirely.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re a far cry from being able to sit back and sip tea while the robots do work for us. In fact, we may experience the opposite. In More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave, <\/em>historian Ruth Cowan documented how household labour (which remains invisible and unvalued) paradoxically increased<\/em> with the introduction of \u2018labour-saving\u2019 devices like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, because it also raised productivity and cleanliness standards.<\/p>\n

Meredith Whittaker<\/a>, co-founder of AI Now and president of Signal, summed up the good and bad news about the future of work when she commented on Colavito\u2019s freelance writing situation<\/a>, predicting: \u201cAI will not replace you. A person making half what you do with no benefits whose job is the same as yours was but now includes babysitting AI will.\u201d That is the real automation charade, and it\u2019s less about AI than we think.<\/p>\n

Technology critics are sometimes called luddites, but maybe we should all be \u2013 in the true sense of who the Luddites were at least. The band of English factory workers that destroyed knitting machinery in the 19^{th<\/sup> century is remembered as being opposed to technological progress.<\/p>\n}

But a closer look reveals that the Luddites weren\u2019t anti-machine at all. They were protesting against the manufacturers, who were using the new technology as an excuse to ignore standard labour practices.<\/p>\n

The important thing to understand is that the current deskilling and devaluing of labour isn\u2019t because the robots are coming for us \u2013 it\u2019s cultural. A lot of our society\u2019s willingness to view human workers as a replaceable commodity stems from the Fordist production model and ideology of the 20^{th<\/sup> century. But even though we\u2019ve embedded that mentality in our current systems, it\u2019s not the only way to treat human labour.<\/p>\n}

As jobs get disrupted and people\u2019s livelihoods are threatened, it\u2019s easy to point fingers at technology as the inevitable reason, whether you\u2019re a pundit or an employer. But the real culprit is a political and economic system that puts profit above all else, and a society that is willing to let workers be mistreated. It\u2019s a big thing to change, but it\u2019s not set in stone. And that\u2019s the real \u2018robots and jobs\u2019 conversation we need to be having.<\/p>\n