Can Technology and Science Advance in a World Wrought With Fear About AI, Robotics and Globalization?

November 11, 2016 – The elections in the United States this week, in one part, are a reaction to a world experiencing constant change through advances in science and technology. A lot of people can’t handle it. A lot of people feel left behind. A lot of people look around for scapegoats and it appears in the United States that they have found their champion who agrees with them that science should be denigrated, that evidence-based reasoning has little place in decision making and policy, and that “others” are to blame for their present state. Eliminate the elites, the visible minorities, the undocumented workers, the foreign companies that manufacture things Americans used to make, build walls to shut all of these threats out, and Utopia will emerge.

Hate to tell them that the reason for vanishing jobs is entirely domestic and that places like Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh and China are not to blame. Companies in the United States have been automating processes for years to remain cost competitive in the global marketplace. Automation is more than just putting robots on assembly lines, machines that replace workers, but is also about computerization and software improvements that streamline office processes and reduce headcount needs. It’s about portable and artificial intelligence (AI) aids that make the need for offices disappear entirely. The World Bank in a recent report states that two-thirds of existing jobs in advanced industrial nations as well as developing ones will disappear in the next two decades.

Donald Trump promises to “reshore” business to the United States and points to China and multinational corporations as being the villains in the changes we are witnessing here in the 21st century. The robotic automation started by American companies like Cincinnati-Milacron, enhanced by companies like Fanuc and Seiko in Japan, and subsequently generalized by Rethink Robotics and others with general purpose automatons like Baxter, are causing the paradigm shift that is dispossessing workers of their jobs from automotive assembly lines to logistics and warehousing.

The phenomenon is not unique to the United States. The country that Trump points to as the villain in the piece, China, is experiencing automation at an accelerated rate well beyond that happening in North America, Europe and the rest of Asia. Chinese automation involves thousands of robots replacing millions of workers on assembly lines. By the end of this year China will surpass Japan as the world’s largest operator of industrial robots.

Why are automatons, AI and machines replacing humans in the job market? Because their adopters seek improvements to their bottom lines. Because shareholders want to receive dividend payments. Because consumers demand more technology with more features for less cost.

“Reshoring” jobs is a main plank of the new President elect. He sees these jobs returning to American cities and towns in Rust Belt states through enacting policies that will penalize American multinationals with global supply chains in place and investments in producing products for global markets. Investments have involved moving jobs offshore to cheaper labour countries. These investments have also created markets for the multinationals in these offshore countries. But multinationals have also moved jobs inshore, from the states of the Rust Belt to southern states where legislation provides them with competitive labour advantages. Will the President elect penalize such inshoring enterprise?

The President elect will likely use tariffs on imported goods as a chief instrument of policy to force reshoring. This means tearing up or renegotiating trade agreements. It certainly means destroying established supply chains.

For technology and science in the United States, any policy inhibitors to the free movement of labour will have consequences. Today the United States, and to some degree Europe and Canada, attract the brightest minds in the Developing World to inshore businesses and academic institutions. Just look at the papers presented in journals written by PhD candidates coming from Stanford University, MIT, Caltech, Northwestern, Emory, Georgia Tech and other top American academic institutions and note how many of these names are not the familiar Jones, Smith and other Anglophone derivations. Cut down on the free flow of skilled technology talent which America continues to draw from abroad and watch them find a place elsewhere to create the future.

The President elect has pledged to coal miners that he will be putting them back to work. Today’s coal mining operations bear no resemblance to those in the past. Automation here is making an impact as well. Where mining will continue, market driven forces will turn human jobs into those done by robots as well.

And because the President elect believes global warming to be a hoax, the nascent and growing industries developing renewable energy and the jobs that come along with these innovations may find new homes abroad in nations where fighting climate change through application of science and technology is given preferential treatment.

An aging and retiring workforce and other changing demographics may make all of this moot. The United States and most advanced industrial countries are experiencing a large shift in population distribution by age. The largest demographic group is no longer 30 years old and younger. An increasingly large portion of the working population is nearing traditional retirement age. These high knowledge workers when they retire may find their collective wisdom captured by AI. Where does that leave a generation of workers younger than them? What kind of future in the workplace will they have? How many fewer jobs will there be that humans will fill? Is the World Bank forecast of a decline in jobs by two-thirds in the next two decades right? Can a President elect pledged to stop the drain of jobs away from America, able through policy to withstand demographics, AI, robotics and globalization?

Highly unlikely. But there may be an answer in the implementation of policies that some governments have tested more recently and it was a reminder this morning to me when a good friend of mine sent me an article appearing in The Guardian by Gideon Haigh. The article entitled “Basic income for all: a 500-year-old idea whose time has come?”

It is hard for a country like the United States, built on Puritan principles and a strong work ethic to contemplate a universal basic income as a way of dealing with declining work opportunity. But the truth is on this planet as technology and automation become transcendent, job security for the majority will go out the window. The government of Canada experimented in the past with a pilot project conducted in the 1970s in a small community in Manitoba. Families and individuals received a “mincome” every month that ensured no one fell through the cracks. Poverty was eliminated in the community. People could work, study, volunteer, or do nothing at all without losing their “mincome.”

The government of Ontario and Canada’s federal government are looking at a basic income as a workable solution in an increasingly automated world. Finland is experimenting with it. Switzerland recently rejected guaranteed basic income in a referendum with the opposed side arguing it was too costly and would discourage people from working. But what if there is less and less work for humans to do?

Such a world where no one is left behind because their jobs have disappeared sounds Utopian. But I am not sure that Donald Trump as President can deliver this Utopian solution to those who have voted for him to restore what they have lost in the 21st century. It certainly runs counter to Republican Party gospel and a man who prides himself on making deals. And considering his distrust of science and evidence, embracing digital disruption through positive social reform is probably not in his bailiwick.

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