Cut to 2030.
300 million jobless. Humans swapped with AI. A paranoid figment to some, but a real possibility according to Goldman Sachs.
Daniel Susskind can see this march of machines coming. An Oxford lecturer and Kennedy Scholar from Harvard who served as a senior policy advisor at No. 10 Downing Street under Gordon Brown and David Cameron, Susskind has been tracking the escalating competition for jobs between humans and technology for over a decade. And it’s not a new phenomenon by a long shot – automation anxiety is as ancient as the hills.
Susskind recounts the transportation upheaval of the 1890s, in which horses were widely replaced by automobiles within a few years in the western world, in his 2020 bestseller A World Without Work. Which the New York Times called “required reading for any potential presidential candidate thinking about the economy of the future”.
Are human beings the next proverbial horses? Depends on who you ask.
Pessimists paint a listless world ruled by robots. Machines that flip hamburgers. Singing harmonies. Playing doctors and chess grandmasters. Optimists view AI as the springboard for a new epoch. Out with old jobs, in with the new. AI eliminating time-consuming routine tasks – robots as old-age carers; superfast design and diagnosis. Freeing up humans for higher pursuits. Ushering in more prosperity.
Susskind is clear of the coming pitfalls. But which way the cookie crumbles remains to be seen. As he summarised in his wildly popular 2017 TED talk, three myths are obscuring our vision of our automated future. First, the “Terminator Myth” – machines may not necessarily overtake humans. “Yes, [machines] substitute humans in certain tasks but they also complement them in others.” Think of a taxi driver, aided by satnav systems for effortless mapping.
Next, the “Intelligence Myth” – human intelligence isn’t necessarily the pinnacle. Sure, routine tasks could be outsourced. But so can non-routines ones, as he detailed in his 2015 book The Future of Professions, co-authored with his father Richard Susskind – a vanguard who co-created the world’s first commercially available AI system in law in the 1980s.
If anything, machines have non-human ways of performing tasks. Garry Kasparov, beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue, cannot analyse 200 million chess moves per second. Same for any supercomputer making medical diagnoses. “It’s performing these tasks in an unhuman way based on the analyses of more cases than any doctor could hope to review in their lifetime.” In short: machines aren’t built in human image – so there is “no polite full stop” to what machines could be capable of doing.
Finally, the “Superiority Myth” – human beings may not necessarily be the best suited for all tasks. As we create more work courtesy tech advancement, it may be the machines that take on this extra work. In short: a demand for labour need not be a demand for human labour. And tech progress would complement machines not human beings, but machines.
What looms ahead is less work. Technological unemployment. Economic insecurity. Endless gig work. Social alienation. “For most people, a job is their seat at the economic dinner table. In a world with no work, it won’t be clear how they get their slice,” he elaborates.
But Susskind believes this is a good problem to have. It gives us the opportunity to course-correct. At SYNAPSE, he will trace the seismic shifts that have changed work – and why AI is a different beast. Why he’s a “technological realist” – but places trust in the state to sustain a human job market. And whether, in a world with less or no work, we become liberated creative spirits or a permanent underclass.
