Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Computers taking our jobs is not a new concept. Visit any advanced manufacturing plant, anywhere in the world, and you will see many people, but yes, also, computers doing jobs once filled by humans. In some cases, they are doing work that humans could never have done, in others a job that would once have taken a lifetime to complete is now being done in seconds.
What we don’t yet know is whether the advent of AI will be part of that same old story, in which machines wipe out some jobs, create some new ones and complement others, or if it will be a revolution that destroys careers without creating anything in the way of replacement. For the little it is worth, my bet is that it will be more like the railways: a technological boom that revolutionised our society, but one in which most of the benefit went to the people using the railways, not the companies that built them, some of which lost their shirts.
Still it is worth thinking about a world in which AI destroys most or all jobs because it is a useful way to think about the value of work. One long-mooted policy response to this — advanced by some on the libertarian right and some on the left — is the introduction of a universal basic income.
Jason Stockwood, the Labour government’s new investment minister, recently said that a UBI may be a necessary tool to manage the disruption of AI. Higher structural employment, higher taxes on those of us who remain in work, and a universal basic income for everyone else is one possible future in a world where AI turns out to be an engine of pure, rather than creative, job destruction.
But there is another option, which is to say that if the choice is between extreme limits on what uses we can put AI to and most of us being paid to sit around and do nothing, then we should choose a world without UBI and AI.
I favour this for the same reason that I favour grants to support small businesses to install facilities so that people with mobility issues can work there.
I also believe in subsidised schemes to encourage hiring for people at the start of their careers. And I think that you need to strike the right balance when deciding whether to have a minimum wage and what it should be, between providing decent remuneration and not squeezing out the least able workers. Essentially, I believe that the fact of “being in a job” has a worth in and of itself.
Now there are limits to this and different people will set them in different places. I don’t think a physically unsafe job is better than no job at all, and that’s not a policy trade-off I would ever want to make.
But in most instances, state support that allows people to keep working, whether by making it possible for those who otherwise couldn’t work to work, or by topping up their income, is a good thing. Even if it costs more to support someone — if the price of retrofitting their workplace or subsidising their transport is more than they will be able to pay back — I think that it is a cost worth paying.
Similarly, I believe that even if you pay a price in terms of innovation and productivity, the ethos that most people of sound mind who want to work, can work is a policy end in and of itself. It is not a byproduct of why I think free markets are good — it is central to it.
Yes, part of why “being in work” is good for us is that it gives us money to buy things and to enjoy a flourishing life, and that can theoretically be replaced by cash transfers. But some of the benefit of being in work is just about being in work — meeting new people we otherwise wouldn’t have done, having a routine, finding personal meaning in the whole thing.
Of course, we may end up in a situation where, thanks to AI, many more of us end up being net beneficiaries of state spending, because there are fewer jobs around.
We might end up having our incomes topped up by tax credits, or spending much longer in formal education as the skills that humans traditionally picked up at the bottom of the career ladder are now done by machines. But the value of a job remains a central benefit of economic development and something that governments should continue to be willing to bear some costs to support.
Protecting my job or your job from technological change — that’s not something that states should worry about. Protecting the idea that I can have a job of some kind — that is absolutely the business of states. I don’t think we do have to choose between a world with AI and a world with plentiful employment, but if it comes to it, we should switch off the machine and stop talking about UBI, too.
stephen.bush@ft.com
Credit: Source link
