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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ROBOTICS AND THE FUTURE OF DECENT WORK

AFTER LAUDATO SI’

Abstract

INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE, ROBOTICA E FUTURO DEL LAVORO DIGNITOSO

DOPO LA LAUDATO SI’

Un importante cambiamento industriale, talvolta chiamato digital divide, è attualmente in corso nelle nostre economie. Si è manifestato in modo visibile ma crudele nella crisi del COVID-19. Chi può lavorare a casa? In termini di posti di lavoro, esistono due distinte economie del coronavirus. Nell’economia dei professionisti ben pagati, la maggior parte delle persone mantiene il proprio lavoro e lavora da casa. Nei settori in cui le retribuzioni sono basse e i lavoratori tendono ad avere meno titoli di studio, le chiusure del coronavirus significano disoccupazione. Le nuove tecnologie digitali come l’intelligenza artificiale (AI), la robotica e l’apprendimento automatico dovrebbero guidare la nuova economia digitale. Ma allo stesso tempo, possono continuare o addirittura espandere le disuguaglianze già presenti. L’impatto completo delle tecnologie digitali sull’occupazione, sulle qualifiche e sui posti di lavoro deve ancora essere valutato appieno. Secondo le migliori stime, aumenteranno i posti di lavoro professionali altamente qualificati, mentre nella fascia più bassa ci saranno posti di lavoro, ma saranno poco qualificati e poco retribuiti, con poche prospettive di carriera. Questo spostamento è già stato messo in discussione dalla Laudato si’ (LS), che ha invitato a riflettere sul rapporto tra crescita economica e innovazione tecnologica. Oltre alle implicazioni dirette sui posti di lavoro e sull’occupazione, la nuova rivoluzione industriale ha profonde implicazioni antropologiche che possono alterare l’impegno umano con il lavoro a seconda del contesto sociale ed economico.

  1. Care is work, work is care1

Care or caring is also a way of being, doing, and existing, which implies and supposes dignity, generosity, solidarity, freedom, and responsibility. Care is a deeply spiritual human experience. It is always inspired by a concern for unity in the making, of becoming one both humanly and spiritually. Work, as a transforming activity, is therefore an essential component of care.

Taking care of the common home entails work, it is, in fact, the work, the toil, that awaits us. Certainly, care of the common home is at the foundation of a radical transformation of our economic system. It cannot be undertaken, without a continuous commitment and directed at the common good. Care requires what has been identified as common social discernment by “The Future of Work – Labour after Laudato si’” Project. “Care for the common home” implies all the forms of work, all those who work, all the organizations that engage in this work. To care for “the common home”, it is necessary to call upon all sectors of economic activity: agriculture, energy and raw materials, industry, services, transportation, and leisure. Among the services, health services are often given special attention. These often receive special attention. But more broadly, services to people, as well as to communities, allow us to understand how, in fact, the care of the common home depends on all economic sectors, not only on those that repair or adjust, what others consume or even degrade.

Nor can is any distinction be made between formal and informal forms of work: the activities that are organized, regulated, protected and supervised and those that escape or develop outside the formal structures. The domestic, the house, the family, the whole space of the “home” all participate in this care of the common home. No time or space can be considered separate from such care; even commuting between home and work is part of caring for the common home. Finally, the care of our common home results, will result, from the work, of each of us individually and from his/her responsibilities, as well as from collective choices at level of business and business sectors, supply chains, communities or territories and families.

The concept of “care of our common home” puts the focus back on the human and relational dimensions of work. Work, like any other situation, places all of us in situations that may, at times, be violent, destructive, alienating, that can endanger our lives, safety and health, but, conversely, also can be constructive and positive. For work to be care, it must have meaning, be decent, provide the setting and circumstances for a human experience that humanizes, and, at the same time, makes a direct contribution to this transformation of our common home.

To develop care in the workplace is therefore to recall the essential conditions of dignity: work must be free, and should not be forced, children should not be subjected to unworthy working conditions, discrimination based on sex, race, religion, etc. must not be tolerated, and finally those who work must be free to organize themselves. Finally, it is also to guarantee a safe environment without threat to health and safety. Another way of saying this is that work is care when the human experience taking place within such work becomes truly humanizing. This human experience is both personal and shared within and across communities. It is potentially rich in meaning: while work, we learn, we discover what we can do, we find satisfaction in work well done. Work is also a way to take care of our common home, to contribute to the common good and to exercise responsibilities. Work engages us in the real world. It allows us to transform reality, to encounter its materiality. Finally, the human experience of work also involves meeting other people, those with whom and for whom we work, sometimes from miles away. Humanization through work thus crosses these four dimensions: personal, collective, embodiment and encounter with the world, and thus introduces us and sustains us in a network of relationships.

At the same time, we must also face the question of how work, each work, whatever the place and the way in which it is carried out, becomes a way of transforming the world as we make efforts to care for it. We also must take responsibility to facilitate access for the more marginalized members of society, including migrants and refugees, persons with a wide range of vulnerabilities, to acquire the skills and techniques needed to fully participate in the transformation of our common home, in an equitable and respectful manner and to which they can contribute their own unique, God-given gifts. Secondly, every job must be able to contribute to the care of our common home. This will undoubtedly require an assessment of the individual contributions of each position, each job, and each work environment to this care. Finally, this same positive contribution must be made by the company/companies, groups of companies or value chains. Appropriate conditions must be set for such collective evaluation to take place. In this way, seeking and engaging in work as care is, in fact, a broadening and enriching human experience that is made possible, both quantitatively and qualitatively, within the context of a “decent work agenda”. On the one hand, “Care is work and work is care” calls on us to ensure that all forms of work can contribute to the care of the common home that no work/effort is a priori excluded, and that all work takes into account/assumes the dimension of care of the common home.

  1. Manufacturing, extractive industries and services2

Industrial robots have displaced production workers and had negative impacts on earnings and jobs in local labour markets where large manufacturing plants have been based. However, the economy-wide impacts are modest so far, since most change is concentrated in a few industrial sectors. At the same time, an aging workforce as well as the loss of manufacturing capacity over several decades have left these industries short of specialized production workers. Much commentary about new technologies and labour market developments reference AI and robotics together as one determinative factor. In fact, they are two important factors that play out differently in different industries and jurisdictions.

Simple reliance on these total economy-wide employment effects is misleading. For instance, in manufacturing and certainly in the automotive sphere, AI is a huge emerging factor at the vehicle usage stage of self-driving cars and electric vehicles. But it is robotics, machine learning and automation that dominate in the production phase. By contrast, in the service industry, particularly with respect to the platform companies, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc., it is AI and what is sometimes called the algorithmic revolution that play the dominant and disruptive role. These new technology organizations are probably the most fundamentally challenging for public policy and Catholic Social Teaching because they deconstruct what it means to be an “employee” in a “workplace” with an “employer”. Among the most challenging developments will be the impact of digitalization on “emotional labour” (i.e., the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfil the emotional requirements of a job) in the care industry where a computer may speak to the care worker in the ‘name’ of the patient.

The automotive industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the world and has the largest concentration of industrial robots. It accounts for 14% of industrial GDP but 38% of the robots. By the standard metric of robot density (number of robots per 10,000 employees), there is no consistent, positive correlation between robots and employment loss. In the automotive case, the introduction of welding robots in the assembly body shop a decade ago was associated in Piedmont with a large jump in employment in the metal working trades across the regional economy.

Henry Ford’s decision to pay his workers enough so that they could afford to buy the cars they were producing was a turning point of the movement for decent work. We have had a globalization of production but no globalization of Fordism. How you make a car in Detroit, Turin and Shanghai is now the same. But the social and economic effects are different. Decent work and the raising of all boats have not followed in the auto industries of China, India, Mexico and Eastern Europe. The virtuous circle of increased demand-expanded production-increased productivity-rising wages-expanded demand was born in the automotive field but now it no longer takes place there.

Few people as yet appreciate the fact that the digital economy requires mining and increasing amounts of it. For technical reasons, most of this will take place underground. In mining, the digitization of ore bodies and robotics for extraction are both combined. This is particularly the case with underground mining. With the new technologies, mines are likely to be places where no one works underground and there are zero emissions. However, alongside this high tech mining, there is the morally offensive case of ‘artisanal’ mining such as for cobalt in the Congo, most often with child labour.

The long-range impact of digitization may not be realized by efficiency gains in physical resources. It may take place by leveraging the intangible resources that are key to all modern industries. The mining industry lags behind its comparators. Economists have spent considerable efforts in analyzing firms’ abilities, particularly in heavy manufacturing industries, to successfully exploit their tangible assets such as plant, equipment and workforces. More recently the focus has shifted to intangible assets such as intellectual property and employee know-how and, increasingly, to data.

Due to the aging of the population, no one expects there to be fewer workers in the future in the care industry, especially in relation to new health and senior care needs, etc. The impact of AI is expected to be extreme in this sector, not on the employment level, but in relation to the social and psychological conditions of work. For current researchers, artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping, not destroying, care work. The focus of analysis is on the ways in which the algorithmic revolution is reorganizing face-to-face services, customer services, disembodied care work and education. These changes are laid on top of the existing position of service work as low-paid, gendered, racialized and insecure work.

First, algorithmic management processes provide a means of increasing customer and managerial control and extracting more emotional labour from workers. Performance management techniques, gamification of work and the use of data are causing intensified extraction of labour effort. Second, care work is becoming mass-produced, excluding consumers with special needs. These changes in services may exaggerate inequalities of access. As mentioned, the future scenario is that of the care worker interacting with an algorithm ‘speaking’ in the name of the client. The peculiar implication of this projection is that it is management being withdrawn from the workplace, while labour remains.

  1. The future of decent work3

A major industrial shift, sometimes called the digital divide, is currently taking place across our economies. It has revealed itself in visible but cruel ways in the COVID-19 crisis. Who can work at home? In terms of jobs, there are two distinct coronavirus economies. In the economy of well-paid professionals, most people keep their jobs and work from home. In sectors where pay is low and workers tend to have fewer educational qualifications, shutdowns mean unemployment.

New digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and machine learning are expected to lead the new digital economy. But at the same time, they can continue or even expand the inequalities already present. The full impact of digital technologies on employment, qualification and jobs is yet to be fully assessed. The best estimates are that highly skilled professional jobs will increase while at the lower end, there will be jobs, but they will be low-skilled and low-paying with few career prospects. This shift has already been questioned by Laudato si’ (LS), which invited reflection on the relationship between economic growth and technological innovation. Aside from direct jobs and employment implications, the new industrial revolution has deep anthropological implications that may alter human engagement with labour depending on the social and economic context. Poor and working-class people are increasingly targeted by the new tools of digital poverty management. Automated eligibility systems discourage them from claiming the public resources that they need to survive and thrive. Databases collect their most personal information with few safeguards for privacy or data security. Predictive models and algorithms tag them as risky investments and problematic parents. Social service, law enforcement and neighbourhood surveillance make their every move visible and offer up their behaviour for government, commercial and public scrutiny.4

The impact of such new disruptive technologies as AI and robotics are expected to displace human skills in some contexts and industries and enhance them in others. This combination will strain employers’ ability to recruit able-bodied young adults to replace retirees in manual, blue-collar, personal care and other in-person service occupations. Innovation is essential to economic growth, health and social and cultural well-being though it takes different forms in different locales. However, the opportunities to participate and the benefits that emerge from innovation are unevenly distributed. Innovation can exacerbate or reduce inequalities, but how and in what direction depends on purposive social actions. Innovation, which exacerbates rather than reduces inequality, can undermine public support for science and innovation and contribute to broader political alienation.

1 Care is work, work is care – An explanatory note, “The Future of Work – Labour after Laudato si’” Project, 14 September 2023, Global, https://futureofwork-labourafterlaudatosi.net/2023/09/14/care-is-work-work-is-care-an-explanatory-note-14-september-2023-global/

2 Care is work, work is care, “The Future of Work – Labour after Laudato si’” Project, 24 February 2022, Global, https://futureofwork-labourafterlaudatosi.net/2022/08/18/care-is-work-work-is-care-24-february-2022-global/

3 Care is work, work is care, “The Future of Work – Labour after Laudato si’” Project, 24 February 2022, Global, https://futureofwork-labourafterlaudatosi.net/2022/08/18/care-is-work-work-is-care-24-february-2022-global/

4 Eubanks V. (2018), Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, New York: St Martin’s Press

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