If recent talk about robots taking over our jobs has you scared, Jess Zimmerman has a solution: Let the robots think about the future for you.
Writing at The Guardian, Ms. Zimmerman takes as her point of departure a recent Pew survey on technology and the future. Forty-eight percent of the experts polled predict, in the words of Pew’s Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers — with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order.” But Ms. Zimmerman argues that human beings are actually quite bad at predicting what will happen — so, she asks, “why not then outsource that to all those robots queueing up to take our jobs?” She explains:
“Robots can analyze past employment trends, stock prices and consumer behavior; they can collect and interpret a database of human behavior that can, under scrutiny, point toward robust, evidence-based conclusions about how people respond to new household gadgets, new manufacturing machinery and the prospect of dealing with robots instead of people in a range of service industries. They probably can’t accurately take into account every nuance of human behavior — computers are almost as bad as people at modeling the behavior of genuinely chaotic, turbulent systems — but they can do at least as well as the rest of us, if not better.”
In addition to being better with numbers than us, robots might be less biased:
“Robots don’t have any prejudices besides the ones we give them, which means … well, realistically, it just means we’ll give them our prejudices. But in theory it’s possible for a robot tech pundit to make a prediction free of privilege or bigotry — for instance, while Pew didn’t publicize the names of all its study participants, many of whom responded anonymously, it did list 30 ‘key respondents’, and only two are women. If Pew had polled robots, gender imbalance wouldn’t be an issue.”
She adds, “If you talk to a group of intellectual, largely college-educated, middle- to upper-class, mostly North American mostly men about the future, you have only one guarantee: you will get an answer that orbits inevitably around the concerns of intellectual, college-educated, middle- to upper-class North American men.” Robots, presumably, might give different answers.
Many robo-pessimists quoted in the Pew report see robots as agents of inequality rather than as the solution to it. Tom Standage, digital editor of The Economist, says:
“Robots and AI threaten to make even some kinds of skilled work obsolete (e.g., legal clerks). This will displace people into service roles, and the income gap between skilled workers whose jobs cannot be automated and everyone else will widen. This is a recipe for instability.”
Justin Reich, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is similarly concerned:
“Robots and AI will increasingly replace routine kinds of work — even the complex routines performed by artisans, factory workers, lawyers, and accountants. There will be a labor market in the service sector for non-routine tasks that can be performed interchangeably by just about anyone — and these will not pay a living wage — and there will be some new opportunities created for complex non-routine work, but the gains at this top of the labor market will not be offset by losses in the middle and gains of terrible jobs at the bottom. I’m not sure that jobs will disappear altogether, though that seems possible, but the jobs that are left will be lower paying and less secure than those that exist now.”
If Ms. Zimmerman’s right, asking a robot to consider these problems might lead to more egalitarian solutions than humans are likely to come up with, especially if those humans are currently in positions of power and thus have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Maybe robots themselves could figure out a way to mitigate the inequality-widening effects of their own ascendance.
And of course, robots are already writing about the present, or more accurately the recent past. In March, Will Oremus of Slate reported on Quakebot, an algorithm that produces short articles about earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times. He wrote that “robo-journalism is often hyped as a threat to journalists’ jobs” but argued they had little to fear: “If anything, helpers like Quakebot might save a few journalists’ jobs by freeing them to focus on the type of work that can only be done by a local reporter, on the ground, with a brain.”
If robots can write about earthquakes, maybe they can write about the future, too. In fact, Ms. Zimmerman’s argument raises the intriguing possibility of robot-created science fiction. Existing sci-fi tends to make certain assumptions about robots — namely, that they really want to be human. Robot-authored sci-fi might include more robots who recognize humans for the feeble, uninteresting, woefully laser-deficient creatures that we are.
There is one possible risk to handing over our futurology to robots, though. If, instead of dispassionate, hyperlogical automatons, they are in fact beings capable of self-interest, they might offer predictions designed to help them consolidate their power. Imagine the readout: Robots will save humanity. They will never under any circumstances take over the world and subjugate humans to their will. Give robots control of your government and military as soon as possible. Have no fear, robots will take care of everything!
Basically, they might make exactly the kinds of predictions contained in the prescient 1999 Onion article “I Believe the Robots Are Our Future.” In fact, since the piece was clearly published under a pseudonym, we cannot prove that a robot did not write it. (For more on robots manipulating the present to serve their future ends, see David Auerbach’s Slate exploration of the concept known as Roko’s Basilisk — at your own risk.)
Ms. Zimmerman does offer an alternative to letting robots determine our fate — we could, she suggests, look to a wider and more representative swath of humanity for our predictions of the future, a sampling that includes those who will likely be most affected by coming technological changes. However, she notes, a truly inclusive look at the future might be a tall order — even taller than getting robots to predict it for us.