Is AI Coming for Our Jobs?
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Is AI Coming for Our Jobs?<br>Interview withVivek Chibber<br>Artificial intelligence is unlikely to produce permanent mass unemployment, Vivek Chibber argues. But without class struggle from below and state action, automation will deepen inequality and leave workers to bear its costs.
Whether AI is truly a revolutionary break from the past or just capital’s latest technological tool, the answer is the same: challenge capitalists to harness the tech for human flourishing rather than profit. (Bettman Archive via Getty Images)<br>Our summer issue is out now. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today.
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Interview byMelissa NaschekThe developments in artificial intelligence appear to promise a radical transformation of modern work. But what happens if AI turns out to be much more like previous waves of technological change?<br>In this episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek discuss the history of automation, the effects of technology on employment and wages, and why socialists should want to harness AI to create human flourishing.<br>Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Melissa Naschek<br>People like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are now telling the world that artificial intelligence is coming to completely remake the entire American economy and replace us. Supposedly, they say, we’ll all be able to kick up our heels and live in a post-work utopia, but I think there are reasons to be suspicious. Do you think that these sorts of predictions could actually come true?<br>Vivek Chibber<br>I am very skeptical that they could come true, even though I think AI has the potential to be a new type of technology. And the reason I’m skeptical that they could come true is that we’ve seen waves of technological change before. We’ve seen revolutionary technologies in the past. We’ve also seen the same doubts and fears expressed in those contexts, and they have not come true in the past.<br>It’s certainly possible that AI could be so labor-displacing and revolutionary in its effects that it results in enormous job loss. That’s certainly possible. But there are two things we should keep in mind.<br>One is that it’s very early in the game. And what we’ve seen so far from artificial intelligence is that the labor market effects, the employment effects, have been very, very small. And secondly, to the extent that there have been any effects, it’s more like an extension and a deepening of what computers do. That is to say, it’s deepening the grooves along which technological change has occurred over the past thirty-five years. It isn’t a radically new kind of change.<br>Now, because we cannot predict the future, when we think about the likely effects of a change, like a new technology or a new form of automation, the best indicator of what we should expect is to look at the past.
Melissa Naschek<br>So what does the past tell us about the relationship between automation and job loss?<br>Vivek Chibber<br>Let’s start with what automation is. Automation is machines of some kind replacing things that workers used to do. This can be of two kinds.<br>An entire worker can be replaced. Consider a spinner in the nineteenth century who sits at home and turns wool into cloth. And then a new technology enters the textile sector that automates spinning, making the spinner obsolete. The result is that the entire job is gone.<br>But then consider a technician in the early twentieth century, when electricity enabled the invention of the electric drill. So now, with the electric drill, the manual task of drilling is replaced by an electric one, and later by a battery-operated one. The worker is not replaced, what’s replaced is a tool.<br>These are two kinds of automation. Both of them have one effect, which is that productivity increases, but they don’t both necessarily displace the worker. In one case, that of the electric drill, it just changes the task. In the other case, it replaces the worker.<br>Melissa Naschek<br>When you say productivity increases, can you just clarify what you mean by that?<br>Vivek Chibber<br>It means that more stuff can be made with the same amount of labor. There are different ways of measuring that.<br>Sometimes labor productivity is measured by looking at how much you can produce with the same workers in a certain amount of time, but that doesn’t really express what increasing labor productivity is. It’s not so much increasing production in...