THE FUTURE OF WORK: Improving the quality of work.
| Author | Watson, Tom |
The automation revolution demands an active state: one that promotes investment in new technologies while securing good jobs for all workers.
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half--vital motion.
When Mary Shelley wrote the preface to Frankenstein in 1831, the industrial revolution was at its height and society was being transformed by scientific developments that were taking place at a dizzying pace. In Victor Frankenstein, Shelley created a character whose enthusiasm for technological advancement and messianic determination to push the boundaries of the possible embodied the spirit of the age. But the 'uneasy, half-vital' being that Victor's experiment creates turns out to be a monster.
Frankenstein is the most famous literary expression of the unease Shelley and her contemporaries felt about the threat scientific advances posed for traditional human society.
Today, a fear similar to the one articulated so powerfully by Shelley is rooted in the belief that 'half-vital' robots will invade the workforce, take our jobs and render us redundant in a more fundamental way than simply making many of us unemployed. What societal function will we fulfil when work is carried out by someone--or something--else? How can we prepare for the changes that technological revolution will bring? Can we harness this change in order to build a fairer and more equitable society in which good work pays and bad work--including work which is less well paid, routine or mundane--is taken care of by algorithms and artificial intelligence.
For the Luddites of the early nineteenth century, this was not a philosophical question but a practical one, and they responded in uncompromising fashion by smashing up the machines they believed threatened their livelihoods. This tactic didn't work then, and it won't work now. But will the relentless march of the robots render us powerless? Or can an active state manage the transition from the industrial to the technological age and allow us to shape our own future?
I set up the Future of Work Commission, comprised of experts from academia, industry and politics, to try and answer some of these questions. It found that, although the new technological revolution is already bringing about rapid change, it could create as many jobs as it destroys. Artificial Intelligence can enhance jobs, not just gut them. Investment in the right areas can provide good jobs that are less vulnerable to automation and draw on essential human qualities that are also the hardest for machines to imitate: creativity, care, teamwork and imagination. It could even help us solve some of the economic problems that feel so intractable after eight years of Tory government: falling wages, low productivity, weak growth, inequality. These problems are the result, in large part, of poor decisions taken by Government and an ideological unwillingness to use the power of the state to address the economic challenges we face as a country.
The Commission's report concluded that the way out of this economic quagmire is to welcome automation and AI and use the levers of the state to shape the new world of work to come. Too much of the debate about technology has become dominated by a discussion about how many jobs will be lost when an army of robot labourers who don't demand holidays or claim sick pay displace their human counterparts. The question of what we want from the new world of work has received far less attention.
The Future of Work Commission was brave enough to conclude that our lives should be...
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