Automation: When humanity becomes just another app
From retail workers losing employment to online delivery sites such as Amazon and farm laborers being pushed out by automated machinery, to self-checkouts taking over for those working in food shops, there is an endless stream of technology taking over for human workers.
When environmentalist and researcher Seán McDonagh left Ireland to live with a tribal group in the Philippines in the late 1960s, he told his mother he would call her once a month. He would travel seven hours by bus to the only place on the island where you could make an international call.
After a few minutes the line, which he would pay about €5 a minute for, would break, and off he would travel up the mountain again. We could never imagine such a feat to make a phone call nowadays.
Since then, Seán has written 12 books on everything from climate change to biodiversity and is now focusing on the area of AI, or artificial technology.
“You have extraordinarily large companies in the world at the moment, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and they’re ruthless. They have extraordinary control and they're not well regulated. These companies get about 80% of all the advertising that is done,” Seán says over the phone from his home in Nenagh, Co Tipperary.
“They are monopolies. Traditionally, good democracies would break up monopolies, like the oil monopoly at the beginning of the 20th century, yet Google still knows more about you than anyone else in the world.”
He’s not wrong. My mind races as he explains all of the ways the four billion phones in the world track our lives: online browsing habits, shopping, cookie requests, and old competition surveys.
I think of the 2000 photos on my phone that all have locations attached. The Find My iPhone app, that every Apple user is expected to install. Credit cards, fitness trackers, Netflix. All of these know your location and habits and that data is split between few entities.
“There are great things about AI but there are problems. Behind all of this, the race to automation is actually moving out jobs,” Seán says.
His recently released book looks into this particular topic in stunning detail.
From retail workers losing employment to online delivery sites such as Amazon and farm laborers being pushed out by automated machinery, to self-checkouts taking over for those working in food shops, there is an endless stream of technology taking over for human workers.
As Seán points out, “A human can only pick fruit for maybe seven hours a day, a machine can do it for 24 hours.” He says that the trend will continue to be seen in every sector including banking, finance, medicine, and even teaching.
“Within twenty years, 60% to 75% of the transport industry will be automated. There are cars and trucks right now that don’t need drivers. It’s not just blue-collar workers that will lose their jobs though, workers in every single area of life will be impacted.
Seán says that the pandemic has significantly sped up the race to automation, with Google doing more work on its algorithms in the last six months of lockdown last year than they had in the previous two to three years. It’s a frightening thought when you take into account what engineer Gordan Moore predicted in 1965.
“Moore's law tells us that we double our digital capacity every three to four years. You’re talking about our digital capacity from the beginning of the 1960s up to 2020, that’s going to be doubled in three years,” Seán says.
In particular, it's believed that third-world economies are the most at risk of losing out in the race to automation. Many countries whose economies rely on shipping items to the Western world will suffer as algorithms and 3D printing allow for products and devices to be made at home. Seán looks at a timely item as an example.
“During the pandemic, we were looking for ventilators and instead of shipping them in, a Google company said they were going to produce them locally with an algorithm,” he says. “That’s a huge change. It is a good thing, but it will have a catastrophic impact on third world economies. It’s just beginning but it’s going to have an enormous impact.”
To combat all of this, Seán says that we need to look to our governments to more strictly regulate monopolies. He also supports the idea of a universal income to promote entrepreneurship as jobs continue to get taken over by robots.
“We need political action and stricter regulation. Fines don’t bother them,” he says, referring to billion-dollar machines like Facebook. “What they don’t want is to be regulated like other industries. We can’t allow the economy to drive it all. We need people who understand the political dimension, the social dimension, and the ethical dimension of this.
“Unless we face it, it will overwhelm us. We need to actually address the problems and not allow these extraordinary companies to drive it on their terms. Everyone will lose if they do.”
All of this said, Seán does like to focus on the good that technology has brought to the world too, from the marvels of modern medicine to the lower impact on the environment that comes with avoiding overseas shipments.
He even called an old friend in the Philippines for free over Whatsapp the other day from the comfort of his home - no buses or two-day long trips required.
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