The Robot Will See You Now

Collected essays …

exploring whether human beings, made in God’s image can flourish in a world of intelligent machines.

The past decade has seen extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. We celebrate the part played by AI in the swift development of Covid-19 vaccines and enjoy the ways in which literature, film and other media feed our fascination with these topics. Yet there is much that is unsettling. For while AI has become an integral part of life, our need for the critically important benefits of human-to-human encounter has in no way diminished.

The Robot Will See You Now offers arresting insights into the role of AI in areas such as health care, employment, security, the arts and intimate relationships, and delves deep into cultural and theological issues. With experts considering how AI is perceived - and its impact on how we interact with one another - this enthralling book will benefit Christians who want to understand and prepare for the opportunities and challenges ahead.

This new book, published by SPCK and co-edited by one of the founders of TechHuman - Professor John Wyatt with Professor Stephen N. Williams, published in 2021.

Thanks to the generosity of the authors and publishers we can provide a chapter from the book, for readers to explore a significant part of the contents and get a sense of the book itself.

Are the Robots coming for our jobs?

Nigel Cameron

An extract from “The Robot Will See You Now”
editors John Wyatt and Stephen Williams, Published by SPCK

© SPCK 2021

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come - namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

John Maynard Keynes, 1930, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”[i]

It seems almost quaint to read Keynes worrying about robots taking our jobs way back in 1930! But in his famous essay on technology and the future he was, as ever, looking ahead.

The most influential economist of the twentieth century, he laid out with startling clarity the employment implications if technology gets ahead of the labour market. Twenty years later, in the United States, American mathematician Norbert Wiener, known as the father of cybernetics (he made up the word), said much the same thing. As he looked forward he also looked back, and drew a precise parallel with the “slave economy” – writing, of course, at a time when Americans born into slavery were still alive. In a slave economy, the slaveholder always wins; slaves are just cheaper. It’s a parallel that reminds us of the origin of the word “robot,” first coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his 1920 play, ‘RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots’ – and derived from the Czech word for a serf or a slave.

“Let us remember,” Wiener wrote,

that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.”[i]

Or as American computer scientist and entrepreneur Marshall Brain has put it, we need to prepare for the coming of a “second intelligent species.”[ii] That’s a provocative way of putting it, and we need to be provoked!

Here’s how I open my book, The Robots are Coming: Us, Them, and God:

The world will soon be teeming with new creatures. It will be the most dramatic change in the history of the human race. It promises to be wonderful, and to be terrible, but above all to be confusing. Because these life-forms will be made by us.

They won’t be people. They won’t be animals. But also they won’t be “things” in the sense in which we have understood “things” in the past. We don’t yet know much about Them and how They will develop. But we can be sure of some facts: They are developing very fast. They are smart – and will keep on getting smarter. They will take on more and more of the tasks that used to be our responsibility. They will work for us, and alongside us. And They will become more like Us all the time.[iii]

We believe God gave us “dominion” over the rest of his creation – to use our minds and our hands for him. Our God-given intelligence has used the raw materials of which this earth is full to invent everything from the wheel and the plough to cars and aeroplanes – and now highly intelligent machines that threaten to take away our jobs, by doing them more efficiently than we can. The significance of these foundational Christian beliefs, and the centrality of work as a calling from God, are explored elsewhere in the book. My focus is on the likely context in which the church, and individual believers, will need to interpret the Christian worldview as labour markets shift and the role of technology (and therefore capital) vis-à-vis human labour become increasingly, and perhaps devastatingly, significant.

Of course, the conventional wisdom is that it’s nonsense to worry about the future of employment. Here it is summed up by Internet inventor (and Google guru) Vint Cerf: ‘Historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys and there is no reason to think otherwise in this case.’[iv]

But what if that assumption proves false? It’s not just people on the political left, who tend to be more sceptical of new technologies, who are asking hard questions about the employment impact of robotisation. Here is American conservative intellectual Charles Murray, writing in the Wall Street Journal. ‘The case for “this time is different” has a lot going for it.’

We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were. I’m familiar with the retort: People have been worried about technology destroying jobs since the Luddites, and they have always been wrong. But the case for “this time is different” has a lot going for it.

When cars and trucks started to displace horse-drawn vehicles, it didn’t take much imagination to see that jobs for drivers would replace jobs lost for teamsters, and that car mechanics would be in demand even as jobs for stable boys vanished. It takes a better imagination than mine to come up with new blue-collar occupations that will replace more than a fraction of the jobs (now numbering 4 million) that taxi drivers and truck drivers will lose when driverless vehicles take over….

The list goes on, and it also includes millions of white-collar jobs formerly thought to be safe.[v]

Murray draws attention to the fact that when horse-drawn vehicles were replaced by trucks there was still a need for drivers, though the news for horses was not so good; they went to the knackers’ yard. And as I point out in my book, Will Robots Take Your Job? A Plea for Consensus,[vi] the threat isn’t confined to the jobs of humans and horses. For the 1988 French film The Bear, more than fifty trained bears were auditioned. But in the Oscar-winning blockbuster of 2015, The Revenant, that was not necessary. Even though the story centres on a grim, protracted fight between the lead character (a trapper played by Leo DiCaprio) and a grizzly, not a single bear was auditioned. It may be hard to credit if you’ve seen the film, but the “bear” was pure pixels.[vii]

In Will Robots Take Your Job? all I assume is that the conventional wisdom could be wrong. If it’s right, of course, we’ve no reason to worry. As Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist, writes in his recommendation of the book: “Nigel Cameron has a refreshingly honest answer to the question of whether robots will take all the jobs: we don't know.” My argument was twofold. First, if things do turn out all right – if what we refer to as “full employment” survives (the slightly vague idea that most people looking for jobs can find them), we are nevertheless going to face choppy times in labour markets as we get from here to there. Already, cab drivers have been disrupted the world over by Uber, and high-street shops by Amazon, and this process has just started. We need to get ready for waves of “Industrial Revolution”-type labour market disruption in many traditional industries. Second, we have to acknowledge that there’s a possibility – in the book the phrase I use is a “non-trivial possibility” – that these disruptive technologies will not create enough new jobs to enable “full employment” to be maintained. How likely is this outcome? To be candid, the more I’ve been involved in these discussions over the past decade the more uneasy I’ve become, because if things do go wrong for labour markets the long-term impact could be devastating. I’m not sure and no one can be sure. But sane people buy fire insurance for their homes, even though the chance of my home burning down is tiny. We need to be prepared. 

In the light of the devastation caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, which most people (including government people in the Department of Health and leaders in Public Health England) assumed would not happen and therefore did not need to be prepared for, we should heed the possibility that the conventional wisdom is being driven by plain wishful thinking. And while the Coronavirus impact has had terrible consequences for both health and the economy, they are consequences in the short term. Those of us who aren’t killed by the virus will soon have recovered, and so will our economy. If robotization destroys full employment, the drastic implications will be with us for ever and, of course, will just get more serious -  from the human employment perspective. Once “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour,” in Keynes’ elegant phrase, has started to “outrun” the “pace at which we can find new uses for labour,” the race will prove unequal.

While the standard view continues to be that we have no reason to worry, there are various dissident voices emerging across the political spectrum - and even from inside the tech community. Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist, has put it like this: demand for labour is going to go down, and we’re not prepared: ‘We don’t have it in our mental model.’ From the liberal end of the political spectrum, Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Bill Clinton (and President of Harvard), has undergone something of a conversion experience and now believes the “Luddites” may be right. In a 2013 lecture titled: “Economic Possibilities for our Children”, that echoes the famous Keynes essay we have quoted, Summers reflects on his first awareness of the question during undergraduate days at MIT:

There were two factions in those debates. There were the stupid Luddite people, who mostly were outside of economics departments, and there were the smart progressive people…. The stupid people thought that automation was going to make all the jobs go away and there wasn’t going to be any work to do. And the smart people understood that when more was produced, there would be more income and therefore there would be more demand. It wasn’t possible that all the jobs would go away, so automation was a blessing. I was taught that the smart people were right.

He goes on to observe that he has had reason to change his mind and depart from the conventional wisdom:

Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject; the Luddites were wrong and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I’m not so completely certain now.[viii]

Keynes framed the question in terms of technology outrunning our finding new uses for labour. Summers frames it as Machine Intelligence substituting capital for labour. While machines have traditionally complemented human labor – which goes back to the Industrial Revolution and in more limited fashion much further back – they could entirely replace it. Taking the self-driving car as an example, he writes: “You can take some of the stock of machines and, by designing them appropriately, you can have them do exactly what labor did before.” Plainly, if that becomes the pattern, the game is up; the machines will have all the jobs.

Even high-skill jobs? That may seem unlikely, though in a provocative recent book the father-and-son team of Richard and Daniel Susskind suggest that the next jobs to go could be the professions. [ix] How could the best paid, most difficult and complex of human jobs, the “professionals” who work as academics and doctors and lawyers, suffer the same fate as lorry drivers and cleaners? As the The Economist magazine points out in an essay on the book, these jobs used to be seen as “safe havens” from all the technological modernization going on around them.

Here is the core of their argument, per The Economist:

How far will this revolution go? Messrs Susskind and Susskind predict that it will go all the way to ‘a dismantling of the traditional professions’. These jobs, they argue, are a solution to the problem that ordinary people have ‘limited understanding’ of specific areas of expertise. But technology is making it easier for them to get the understanding they need when they need it.

As we all know you can already get plenty of legal advice (and free legal forms) online, and endless amounts of medical advice. People often annoy their doctors by taking along a sheaf of printed-outs! And as the Susskinds point out, this process has just begun.

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There are three ways of looking at this situation.

First, from history. As I argued recently in an article for the website UnHerd, it’s not right to say, with Vint Cerf, that “historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys.” The devil really is in the details.[x] Cerf’s sweeping statement echoes the responses of many in the technology community – and also political leaders anxious to prevent anxiety. Perhaps the most cavalier statement has come from Stephen Mnuchin, the current U.S. Treasury Secretary, in an interview with the website Axios. He claimed that the issue is “not even on our radar screen;” any such effects are “50 to 100 more years" away![xi]

Meanwhile, researchers have been looking in increasing detail at the costs involved when Britain’s Industrial Revolution led to a huge jump in prosperity, including a detailed review of what effect the new machines had on the working population. For those of us reared on the standard view that the Luddites were over-reacting and everything turned out for the best they have unearthed disturbing facts. These are facts we need to bear in mind as we face fresh changes ahead.

Between 1700 and 1850 the proportion of unskilled workers in the British labour force actually doubled, from 20% to 40%.

We tend to think of automation as using machines to do routine work. But at the core of the Industrial Revolution was the opposite. The heart of Britain’s hugely successful textile industry was the “domestic system” – skilled craftsmen working their looms at home. The new Industrial Revolution machines took this work into factories and made it simpler so that fewer operators with more limited skills could now provide most of the labour.

One effect of this was a big increase in child labour; the machines were designed so they could be operated by children, and children made up around half the factory hands. Having lost their skilled work, the “domestic system” craftsmen now faced competition for the new, lower-paid, machine-based jobs from less-skilled workers.

And it was this that led to the most startling effect of all: an astonishing increase in the number of unskilled labourers. The Chief Economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, made a recent speech to the Trades Union Congress in which he stated that between 1700 and 1850 the proportion of unskilled workers in the British labour force actually doubled, from 20% to 40%.[xii] Of course, many of these workers did have skills, but they were skills no longer in demand. To find work they had to compete with people like farm labourers for unskilled jobs. It was, literally, generations before the situation turned around.

Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey sums up the research:[xiii]

Technological progress has created prosperity for mankind at large, yet it has always created winners and losers in the labour market. During the days of the British Industrial Revolution a sizeable share of the workforce was left worse off by almost any measure as it lost its jobs to technology.

During the first six decades of the Industrial Revolution, ordinary Englishmen did not see any of the benefits of mechanization: as output expanded, real wages stagnated, leading to a sharp decline in the share of national income accruing to labour.

To be more specific, the researchers found that while output per worker increased by 46%, real wages rose by just 14%. Working hours actually increased by 20%; hourly wages therefore actually declined in real terms.

In other words, the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the workers of England in the early nineteenth century was terrible, even though in the longer term it raised living standards for everyone. We are reminded of Keynes’ famous dictum that “in the long run, we are all dead.”[xiv]

Strikingly, David Ricardo, the leading economist of his day, after initially enthusing about the machines changed his mind and ended up sympathizing with the Luddites! He writes: “I am convinced, that the substitution of the machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the class of labourers.”[xv] However, this did not mean he believed that the mechanization process should be closed down. His work on the principle of “comparative advantage” is widely seen as the core idea behind what we now call globalization, so it is not surprising to find him saying that if Britain were not to take advantage of the new machines other countries would.

Second, we can review the issue from the perspective of emerging trends in the current situation. We know about the impact of Uber and other car-sharing companies on traditional cabbies – especially in cities like New York, where the “medallion” that licenses taxi drivers was at one time worth $1 million; there have been reports of suicides as the value of licenses has collapsed.[xvi] Amazon started out as a bookseller, and rapidly killed off hundreds of small bookshops and then one of the two big U.S. bookshop chains (Borders). Using its power as a monopsonist (a monopoly buyer) in the book trade Amazon has had a huge impact on publishers, driving down consumer prices; they went to war with the Hachette group, who had tried to resist them, and Amazon won. Now, of course, the company sells pretty much anything, and its success has destroyed countless brick-and-mortar high street retailers and threatened the big supermarket chains in many countries. These are both powerful examples of new technology-driven platforms that have disrupted traditional jobs and companies right across the economy – and in the process providing better value to consumers. They have succeeded in part by using technology and in part by creating large numbers of mostly low-paying jobs – though as warehouses are increasingly robotized and cars become self-driving, almost all those jobs will disappear.

That takes us to a parallel trend: the emergence of new kinds of value produced with scarcely any human role at all. This is most strikingly illustrated by the contrast between Kodak, for generations the global leader in photography, and Instagram. Kodak has essentially collapsed, but it once employed 145,000 people – plus of course indirectly countless thousands in photo-shops around the world. It’s an astonishing fact that when Facebook bought the company in 2012, for a bargain $1 billion, Instagram had exactly 13 employees!

We used to take and print small numbers of photographs using film and photo-shops. Now we take thousands of them, store and share them digitally, and occasionally print them ourselves. There are many varieties of digital goods that bring value to great numbers of consumers without employing many people at all. The most prominent, of course, are “social media,” a blanket term for many different services from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn. They do employ people, but few in relation to the number of their users. Another stunning example is communications sensation WhatsApp. When Facebook bought it in 2012 for $19 billion it had just 55 members of staff. That may be a world record for the amount of capital per employee in a company. We all know the extraordinary convenience of buying everything from bleach to airline tickets via an app – and being able to do it while you’re watching TV or taking a bath. These are new kinds of goods and services, and government economists are having trouble accounting for them in their routine cost-of-living numbers.

Third, and most significantly, there is the human dimension. Some years back I was invited to Brazil to make a TEDx speech on robots and jobs. I talked about Kodak and Instagram and Whatsapp, and – looking ahead – sketched the potential of robotics to end the need for human employment pretty much completely. I summed up the problem by asking if this would take us to heaven – or to hell. Many people feel they would love the opportunity not to have to work if they could take “early retirement.” That sounds a lot nicer than long-term unemployment.

Plainly, one huge question is that of income, and that has led to a lot of interest in the idea of a “universal income” – the idea that everyone should be paid by the state so they can get by whether or not they have a job. It’s an intriguing idea, partly as it has had advocates on the right as well as the left of the political spectrum. The issue is actually more pressing in the U.S., where social benefits such as unemployment pay and healthcare are mostly lower than in continental Europe (or completely absent). In some European countries the “social wage” already offers a kind of universal income; being in or out of low-paid work doesn’t make much financial difference. One of the goals of the UK’s controversial Universal Credit reform has been to stop people making more money from benefits than they would get in employment.

I am no fan of universal income, and I think the amount of attention it has been getting distracts us from the core human problem at stake if jobs go away. In industrial society our entire lives are shaped around jobs – education to prepare us for them and then the daily routines of doing them for income. After I gave a lecture on this theme at a university in Washington, DC, one of the students neatly summed up the problem. “Are you telling us that as soon as we graduate from college we shall need to retire?”

In his famous essay that we quoted at the start of the chapter, Keynes points out that while workers look forward to the end of the day they often aren’t quite sure what to do with the leisure when it comes. When we no longer have to work, what do we do? How do we feel about worklessness, whether we don’t need to work or can’t even if we’re able? What do you do with your time if you find yourself marooned on a desert island? This may seem a bigger issue for the poorly educated. But plenty of professional people find their lives in tatters after losing their jobs or being forced into early retirement. As well as income, they’ve lost their routines, their colleagues, and with that part of their sense of self-worth.

What do people do if they don’t need to work? I’m reminded of my late mother, who in retirement busied herself working in three separate charity shops in Edinburgh, each for one or two days a week. People who make a success of stepping down from their jobs generally create something very like another job for themselves. Perhaps the most striking example is Bill Gates. After leaving Microsoft he and his wife set up their foundation. Wealthy people who don’t need to work – the kind the press dubs “socialites” – often throw themselves into cultural activities, sitting on the boards of orchestras and museums and charities. We need to prepare for a world in which we find ourselves taking earlier and earlier retirement.  The church is the world’s largest volunteer organization; it needs to prepare to handle many more.

It’s plain that we need to think this through from a theological perspective. In Genesis “work” is presented to us as both something good and normal before the fall (Adam cares for the garden, 2:15) and something disordered and unpleasant after the fall (“in the sweat of your face shall you eat bread,” as the Authorised Version memorably puts it! 3:17-19) What if we don’t work because we can’t?

We could start by developing a “theology of retirement” to bridge into this emerging situation. We have come to think about Christian “vocation” as getting a job for life. Indeed, until quite recently most people died before or shortly after they stopped being employed.[xvii] If we don’t need to earn pay, are we still called to work? What of leisure? For most of human history few people had any;  many of us now have a lot, and we could soon have a lot more. Do we have a theology of leisure? Does the Sabbath teaching in Exodus (20:10), of a day with no normal labour set aside for God, translate into modern notions of time off for family and friends – and entertainment? The expansion of retirement years, and the growth of “free time” as employment laws have cut down on work time for many, require a fresh look at what God asks us to do with our time – and that’s now! It will help us think through what it could mean if the time available starts to grow.

The implications are dramatic. What if tomorrow is your last day at work, but you’re still paid. What if you’re at university, and you graduate straight into retirement? This may sound far-fetched, but don’t forget that economists from Ricardo to Keynes and technologists from Norbert Wiener to Bill Gates think we’re moving that way. How are Christians to think?   

[i] Norbert Wiener, 1950, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Free Association Books, repr. 1989)

[ii] Marshall Brain, The Second Intelligent Species (BYG Publishing, 2015)

[iii] Nigel Cameron, The Robots are Coming: Us, Them, and God (London: CARE Trust, 2017)

[iv] Quoted by Walter Frick, Harvard Business Review, “Experts Have No Idea If Robots Will Steal Your Job,” August 8, 2014.

[v] Charles Murray, “A Guaranteed Income for Every American,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2016

[vi] Nigel Cameron, Will Robots Take Your Job? A Plea for Consensus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017)

[vii] See Business Insider, 26 December 2015.

[viii] Lawrence Summers, “Economic Possibilities for our Children,” NBER Reporter, 2013 Number 4.

[ix] The Future of the Professions (Oxford: OUP, 2015), reviewed here: economist.com/news/business/21674779-once-regarded-safe-havens-professions-are-now-eye-storm-professor-dr-robot

[x] Nigel Cameron, “Why we should listen to the Luddites,” July 23, 2018. https://unherd.com/2018/07/why-we-should-listen-to-the-luddites/

[xi] Quoted in Jamie Condliffe, “Actually, Steve Mnuchin, Robots Have Already Affected the U.S. Labor Market,” MIT Technology Review, March 28, 2017.

[xii] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2015/labours-share

[xiii] Carl Benedikt Frey et al., Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2 July 2018

[xiv] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

[xv] Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817, chapter 31 “On Machinery.”

[xvi] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/nyregion/nyc-taxi-suicides.html

[xvii]  The Office of National Statistics has calculated that life expectancy at birth is almost double what it was in 1841, when, for example, a baby girl born that year could expect to live only to 42. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09 The ONS gives a helpful discussion of the significance and cause of this shift; higher levels of infant mortality make the difference seem more dramatic than it was, but not by much.