Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has a surprisingly naive take on the issue of AI and robots replacing human jobs. Mnuchin, who said earlier, that human..
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has a surprisingly naive take on the issue of AI and robots replacing human jobs.
Mnuchin, who said earlier, that human obsolescence is “not even on our radar screen…50–100 more years away” — and that he’s “not worried at all.” For those of us in the tech industry, it’s clear his timescale is inaccurate and that, if the government is complacent about AI, the country is setting itself up for an economic shock.
There’s been downward pressure on jobs since the Industrial Revolution due to leaps in productivity brought about by human ingenuity and lucky discoveries. This has accelerated since the ’80s with the mass adoption of computers, but the market has more or less kept up, creating new openings to fill the eradicated ones, albeit not in the same places (coastal cities have gained, Rust Belt areas have lost out).
However, we have a tsunami on the horizon: automation using AI. It will place intense downward pressure on employment, and threatens to catch a generation (really, three generations) off guard, with unemployment levels higher than the Great Depression.
The automation tsunami
Automation is going to leave millions of Americans un- or under-employed not in “50 to 100 more years,” but within the next decade. As someone very familiar with one of the most-affected sectors, the customer service industry — I invented web chat technology for customer service in the late 1990s, and have been in the space for over 20 years — I can already see the change happening, and the robots appearing, today.
From our data on large banks, telcos, retailers and so on, we can see that approximately 40-50% of tasks performed in customer care fall into a category that is highly susceptible to automation: routine processes like updating payment cards, addresses, passwords and other basic processes. Over 3 million people in the US alone are employed in call centers, and it’s clear to me that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will displace a substantial number of US workers in a far shorter time period than what Mnuchin is positing.
A new New Deal
We need a new New Deal to tackle the consequences of automation. It should be big, aggressive, and, unlike the first one under FDR, it should be preemptive. Without some kind of counterbalancing action, we’ll see tens of millions of workers stranded, with curtailed employment prospects. This will kick off a hereditary shockwave of economic hardship that could be felt for generations.
