Technological advancement often goes hand in hand with more efficient systems- that need a lower number of workers. Many workers will be retrenched and young school- leaving people may never be employed,due to lack of jobs.
If these retrenched workers are not re-skilled and re-employed, then it will help create a duality of massive poor, unemployed communities versus much smaller rich, skilled communities.
The numbers of people purchasing services will drop dramatically ( the large mass of unemployed will not be able to afford most services)
Will this be sustainable?
Should we be looking at the Social Impact of technological advancement and be trying to mitigate some of the negative effects?
Is technology and it's advancement aggravating the Social Divide?
Social Scientists and anthropologists and more: help us on this one
I agree with your position.
I am a nurse scientist with expertise in nursing workforce policy-making/materializing (Article Optimizing Staffing, Quality, and Cost in Home Healthcare Nu...
) and now developing my theory-driven artificial intelligence algorithms (Article Challenging Rules, Creating Values: Park's Sweet Spot Theory...
).Along with them, I presented the risk of Virtual Reality (Article The Dark Shadow of Virtual Reality
) and Artificial Intelligence (Article Act Now: A Call to Action for Scholarly Preparation in Mathe...
) in my recent publiations.I think that AI could make social inequity and discrimination much worse unless it is not operated by ethical and justice human-beings. It can also be supported by the following book:
O’Neil C. Weapons of math destruction: How Big Data increases inequality and threatens democracy. New York, NY, U.S.A.: William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, LLC., 2016.
AI is expected to create more new jobs; however, the number of the job would not be large enough to cover the unemployed. In addition, the new job requires a very advanced new knowledge and skills such as computer programmings and big data analytics. Those social phenomenon would lead to the need of micro college such as the DaVinchi Coders School (https://www.davincicoders.com/), creating new educational jobs.
Even so, the society should guarantee the nation's basic level of quality of life to secure a reasonable circular flow of economic system, I think.
In the long run, AI will replace the data-driven jobs. And if they are performing much better than humans, then humans can focus on much more bigger questions to solve. with the level of intelligence that human kind has, it's a pity to waste it in jobs that could be done by machines.
Yes, obviously there will be unemployment in the sectors where there are employed people right now. But, AI will open up new opportunities in a different perspective. Education systems will change to adopt for the new model of economy. This is important, as it will distribute the jobs among various skills. Depending upon the development of each countries, there will be delays. But within a period of few decades, almost all the countries will get adopted to the new model. It could even dissolve the national boundaries.
There are already trials of universal basic income model, which didn't work as expected. But, when the development hits a peak it might work. The new job fields does not necessarily have to be space exploration or quantum computing, but areas like art and music might also get more attention. Information based jobs might disappear, aesthetic and exploratory jobs which needs human's intellect might open up.
I agree with Claire Su-Yeon Park and appreciate the links to her articles provided. One can look at the history of workplace innovations and see that often there is permanent displacement for workers. The idea that humans replaced by AI will simply move on to higher level work does not take into account the overall political economic system. If one driving force under capitalism is profit for capitalists and AI is more cost efficient, then jobs will be lost. The social problems that are created may not be solved in a very adequate way. The way that work will be described will also change. I include AI in my article "Busy as a Bee or Unemployed?: Shifting Scientific Discourse on Work." (2012) Minerva 50(1): 45-64.
Article Busy as a Bee or Unemployed?: Shifting Scientific Discourse on Work
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