Will artificial intelligence become a Damocles sword over humanity's head?

The big question today in every corner of the world, including India, is this: Will the new technology wave AI create similar violent protest movements and what kind of resolution will be reached?

Technological unemployment occurs when developments in technology and working practices cause some employees to lose their jobs. The phrase and the event appear to have headline status nowadays. 

Here is the Financial Times from London: “Tech companies axe jobs…”; and closer home, the Times of India: “IT (information technology) jobs slowdown: Sector sees 10 per cent dip…”. There are also the modern-day proofs to establish a topic’s popularity: Reddit has multiple discussions on the issue, and Wikipedia has an article devoted to it. This entry reviews the unemployment caused by technology through the ages and says that “a number of studies have predicted that automation will take a large proportion of jobs in the future”.  

It is worth looking at the past to draw some insights about the complex future that we face. Between 1811 and 1817, a group of textile workers whose jobs were threatened by the automated looms of the first Industrial Revolution rallied around a Robin Hood-like figure, Ned Ludd, and attacked mills and machinery until the British government suppressed them. Economists saw in the Luddite movement an early example of a pattern: Large-scale automation entering the workplace and affecting wages and employment prospects. Is it possible that a similar Luddite movement may rise against the artificial intelligence (AI) technology revolution? 

John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” suggested a new term: “Technological unemployment”. He further postulated that this was caused by our discovery of means to economise labour, but this revelation could outrun the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. 

India has battled with this issue throughout its recent history. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a struggling lawyer in Bombay, acquired the title “Mahatma” after he led the peasants of Champaran against “exploitative British indigo plantation owners”, who allegedly gave low prices for the crop. However, history tells us that the low price for the indigo dye was not because of exploitative British plantation owners but a result of German companies like Bayer and BASF synthetically producing indigo from coal tar. 

A more recent case study that we Indians have chosen to forget was that fateful day in December 1978, when over half a million bank employees throughout the country went on a two-day strike to protest computerisation in banks. That was a time when banks would take forever to clear cheques; for example, when I was a student at IIM Calcutta in 1970, a cheque for my fees from my father’s account in the Kannur branch of State Bank of India would take about two weeks to be credited when deposited in Kolkata (then Calcutta). Still, bank employees resisted computerisation vigorously for the next few years. The government of that time held on firmly and we can see what happened: Banking has moved on from having to visit a bank for every transaction to doing it on a mobile phone. The use of banks has thus moved from under 10 per cent of the population then to over 90 per cent after banks computerised. 

A little more than a decade later, 1982 saw a massive strike involving over 250,000 workers from more than 50 mills across Mumbai, driven by widespread frustration over low wages, poor working conditions, and ineffective representation from the official union. Depending on one’s ideology at that time, one blamed either the “wicked” mill owners or the “wicked” workers’ union leader Datta Samant. Rarely is the real underlying reason mentioned: The arrival of synthetic cloths like nylon and polyester. Practically all the cotton textile mills closed, almost all mill workers lost their jobs, and the millowners converted their land into super-profitable real estate ventures. 

The big question confronting us today in every corner of the world, including India, is this: Will the new technology wave of artificial intelligence (AI) create similar violent protest movements and what kind of resolution will be reached? 

Some early anti-AI protest movements are under way already. In London, a group of 20 or so protesters recently stood outside of the United Kingdom’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, chanting things like “Stop the race, it’s not safe” and “Whose future? Our future”, with the hopes of attracting the attention of policymakers. In San Francisco, protesters held a demonstration outside OpenAI’s office over concerns that their technology could cause “human extinction”. The protestors say their goal is to get governments to regulate the companies developing frontier AI models like ChatGPT.  

Even Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of the web, has started a campaign for a human-centric approach with a goal to restore the web as a tool for humanity, emphasising individual empowerment and accessibility. He says that he sees threats to 

the open web from misinformation, loss of personal data control, and the increasing domination by big tech platforms. 

Governments everywhere, including in India, ought to be struggling to decide what kind of regulation is necessary and appropriate. As in the case  of earlier technology waves, the challenge is to strike  a balance between too much regulation, which will hinder reaping the benefits of AI, or too little regulation, which will savagely act as a sword against humanity. 

 

The author (ajitb@rediffmail.com) is devoting his life to unravelling the connections between  technology and society