Will robots take your job?

Abstract

Human nature finds the threat of robots taking our jobs strikes deeply disturbing.As a young scholar, I enjoyed reading stories about the mythical Ned Ludd; I have a neighbour, who is seriously concerned that a dishwasher somehow makes her housework redundant.However, the prospect is also very much of the moment: we are being flooded by literature ranging from disaster Luddite scenarios to blind techno-optimism.Admittedly, I am guilty for adding one more book to the torrent.Inspired by the diversity of the existing literature and emerging 'gaps in theory', I set out to edit a book on education and technological unemployment with my colleagues Michael Peters and Alex Means (Peters et al., 2019).Reviewing more than 20 chapters for our book provided a pretty good grasp of current literature related to technical unemployment.It is within this spectrum of literature, that Nigel Cameron's Will Robots Take Your Job? seeks its own space and offers its own contribution.In the Introduction, Cameron warns readers that it is 'time to stop being naïve'.Using a mash-up of well-known sources, he makes the case that the risk of the collapse of the fullemployment norm is hard to estimate, but real and threatening.Looking at lack of coherent policy response, Cameron offers an interesting solution: 'What they need is to synthesize these divergent possibilities into a single approach that is focused on risk.' Cameron proceeds to assess the advance of machine intelligence into the workplace.He looks at various sectors: transportation industry, legal, financial, computer services and management, education, elder care and nursing, psychology and psychiatry.Each of these sections are backed by sound literature review and 'usual suspect' authors, such as Summers, Schumpeter, Susskind and Susskind, Frey and Osborne, with a touch of Norbert Weiner.Though the sections are far too short to provide new insights into each field, taken together, they provide an interesting overview by allowing readers to draw connections and notice similarities across a wide range of occupations.The next section examines some important Luddite arguments.While the author is not a Luddite himself, he does take these arguments seriously.I find this particularly refreshing, and for at least two reasons.First, though Luddism is not the best way forward, Luddite arguments do make important contributions to the debate.Second, the main project of Cameron's bookdeveloping social consensus on technological unemploymentcan succeed only through dialogue with all involved parties.Here, Cameron's work shows a combination of theoretical nuance and political wisdom, all too rare in the mainstream literature.The next section, 'Welcome to the Rust Belt', examines existing and forthcoming landscapes of unemployment and future sources of employment.Taken together, these analyses do not predict a particularly bright future for human work, so Cameron starts to build the case towards a disruption consensus.Again, somewhat predictably, he concludes: 'The responsible thing is to plan for all outcomes that are seriously possible.'This conclusion, argues Cameron, is a possible way for building consensus.In the following section, 'Building Consensus and Getting Prepared', Cameron sets out to build this consensus through a series of preparations.We need to prepare the public, and leaders need to frame the discussion; we need to prepare the government, and efficiently manage the transition; we need to take alternatives (such as universal basic income) seriously; we need to prepare the workforce through novel and innovative forms of education; and we need to prepare ourselves, embrace the challenge of technology, and find ways of employing technology in the service of humanity.