Automation is poised to spark a “robot revolution” in the American economy that will see machines potentially replace humans in jobs ranging from factory work to the medical field, according to lawmakers and experts who met at a congressional hearing Thursday.
“[I]f the world’s best medical diagnostician is not today a piece of technology, it soon will be,” Andrew McAfee, co-director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business, predicted in his testimony before the Joint Economic Committee.
These possibilities have spurred several policy debates in Congress about how to handle the impact of automation on jobs, but the witnesses emphasized that automation might necessitate counterintuitive government responses. Throughout the hearing, witnesses and lawmakers acknowledged the tension between the long-term benefits of new technologies and the possibility for social distress.
“We know that automation can boost productivity, lift aggregate demand, reduce consumer prices, and improve our quality of life,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said during her opening remarks. “We also know that in the short run, innovation can displace workers causing severe economic pain to workers whose jobs are automated out of existence or whose wages are reduced dramatically.”
Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., offered a similar sentiment and said robots will “fill in for humans in both blue- and white-collar jobs” as technology advances. “[T]his new robot revolution could be contributing to pressures arising within our changing labor force,” he said.
The hearing featured frequent acknowledgment that the American economy has benefited from previous waves of automation, without insurmountable stress on human workers, but the witnesses speculated that the current trend might be more problematic.
“The kinds of ‘thinking’ that our machines are capable of doing is changing, so that it is becoming possible to hand off to our machines ever more of our cognitive work,” said Adam Keiper, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “We are also instantiating intelligence in new ways, creating new kinds of machines that can navigate and move about in and manipulate the physical world.”
These concerns have played a major role in the ongoing debate over immigration, and Sen. Jeff Sessions has been particularly forceful in arguing that the federal government should slow the number of incoming foreign workers in order to avoid a social crisis.
“How many should we bring in [from] abroad to take routine work that our people need to be doing? Else they’re going to be on welfare, they’re going to be depressed. What are they going to do with their lives?” he said during a hearing in February. “We have a declining job [market]. Robotics, computers, technology is making us more productive, which, in the long run, should be good and I don’t intend to try to stop, but this is the reality that we’re dealing with.”
McAfee suggested that high-skilled immigration could drive job creation. “[T]he evidence is clear that immigrant-founded companies have been great job-creation engines,” he said. “Yet our policies in this area are far too restrictive, and our procedures are nightmarishly bureaucratic.”
He also encouraged lawmakers not to fear an imminent end of work. “I do not believe the era of mass technological unemployment is right around the corner, or, in other words, that the robots are about to take all of our jobs,” McAfee said.
Over the long term, however, 21st century automation might provoke more significant government actions than the adoption of one or another immigration policy. Keiper noted that one increasingly-common proposal is a government-provided guaranteed minimum income.
“A guaranteed income certainly would represent a sea change in our nation’s economic system and a fundamental transformation in the relationship between citizens and the state, but perhaps this transformation would be suited to the technological challenge we may face in the years ahead,” he said.
That proposal can’t resolve the more fundamental question about the importance of work to each individual person. “There is good reason to challenge some of the technical claims and some of the aspirations of the [artificial intelligence] cheerleaders, and there is good reason to believe that we are in important respects stuck with human nature, that we are simultaneously beings of base want and transcendent aspiration; finite but able to conceive of the infinite; destined, paradoxically, to be free,” Keiper said.
