This post is part of "Periscopio", the Linkedin newsletter which every week delves into Futuro Prossimo themes, and is published in advance on the LinkedIn platform. If you want to subscribe and preview it, find it all here.
Do you remember the scene from the movie “I, Robot” in which Will Smith (a police officer who hated robots) interrogated the industrialist producer of the android suspected of having killed a person? At one point the guy looked Smith in the eye and hurled a j'accuse at him: “I guess his father lost his job because of a robot. Maybe she would have banned the Internet to keep libraries open."
We are in times of "robotic painters" like Midjourney and From E 2, but as you can see art does not imitate life only when it is made by an AI. Oh yeah? In some ways yes. Automation has always cost the human workforce tears and blood. Salaries, dignity, time, lives. It has only done so to varying degrees over the decades, depending on the degree of advancement. And as you can imagine, today the pace is higher.
Should we really fear that artificial intelligence will become sentient and take over? Nope.
This is fantasy. Reality is worse: the reality is that we are not doing enough to prepare for a future where millions, perhaps billions of people with outdated skills will be sidelined.
Because they will be. If automated and less expensive alternatives are available, employers (and the profit-based system) will automatically choose. They are already doing it: in Italy in the next few years 4 to 7 million workers could be supplanted.
Elsewhere it has already happened: this year the workers of a facility Zenni Optical near San Francisco have been replaced with robots equipped with vision and able to correctly identify, control and place each labeled item in the corresponding bag. A monotonous and tiring job for most people, but not for robots equipped with these sensors. Robots that, once purchased, do not require salaries or benefits.
Workforce waiting for the Tsunami
I am not among the lost world theorists. This step will not bring death and destruction forever: even the World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025 automation will have created at least 12 million more jobs than it will replace. One thing is certain, though: in the meantime it will be a disaster, and for new AI experts on the way there will be too many people without the skills to produce, maintain and monitor robots or artificial intelligence programs.
All of these people may simply end up unemployed or with a job that offers too little pay to support them, or a family.
I have already told you about the 'blow' that is about to hit call centers, where human employees they will be literally wiped out by the Chatbots. Later it will be the turn of quite a few security personnel: Knightscope has already started using various robots to monitor shopping malls and stadiums. In the canteens of American hospitals and universities, a few robots peep out who prepares salads between one notification and another.
It's not the first time. It won't be the last
It has already happened in the past that the world workforce has had to adapt to technological advances. More than 200 years ago, it took the form of the Luddites (who took their name from a possibly fictional boy named Ned Ludd, who allegedly destroyed a loom in protest).
Luddites burned factories everywhere in Britain, where mechanized looms and knitting looms replaced weavers and other textile workers. Did it work? No. In the same way, the protests (bitter or mild) against cars, telephones and computers which over the decades have eliminated a large part of the workforce, offering new opportunities to another segment of workers.
The issue isn't whether robots, AI, or who knows what else will be bad. The problem is us. Every "rescue" plan we prepare against such phenomena is based on the same scheme as any animal: attack or flight. Either we protest, or we don't care.
Robotic workforce: we need to start running
Very simply: our process of adapting to the transformations we are about to undergo must resemble the “space race” that the USA and Russia engaged in in the 50s and 60s. We must realize that this future is not starting now, but has already started for quite a while. And before we witness its worst effects we must think about schools.
To nursery schools, to primary schools. In high schools, where we must place more emphasis on "soft skills" and on the abilities that on the one hand prepare the new generations for technology, on the other make them more difficult to replace (because there are qualities that CANNOT be replaced).
What about the workforce losing their jobs? It needs to be retrained, and benefit from a more robust social and economic network. We do not do as for climate change, which has been denied for over a century: we do not wait to fully take a wall, we change first.
We use our intelligence. The human one.
