The Machines Are Coming
The Machines Are Coming
APRIL 18, 2015
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly
scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a
college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might.
A robot with emotion-detection software interviews
visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named
“embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with
invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad
companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of
Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.
Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming
for more and more jobs.
Not just low-wage jobs, either.
Today, machines can process regular spoken language and
not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can
classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out
conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.
Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out
who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who
needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world,
software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and
whom they’ll vote for.
To crack these cognitive and emotional puzzles, computers
needed not only sophisticated, efficient algorithms, but also vast amounts of
human-generated data, which can now be easily harvested from our digitized
world. The results are dazzling. Most of what we think of as expertise,
knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic
competency, fueled by big data.
But computers do not just replace humans in the
workplace. They shift the balance of power even more in favor of employers. Our
normal response to technological innovation that threatens jobs is to encourage
workers to acquire more skills, or to trust that the nuances of the human mind
or human attention will always be superior in crucial ways. But when machines
of this capacity enter the equation, employers have even more leverage, and our
standard response is not sufficient for the looming crisis.
Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that
much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough”
job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than
quirky, pesky humans. Technology in the workplace is as much about power and
control as it is about productivity and efficiency.
This used to be spoken about more openly. An ad in 1967
for an automated accounting system urged companies to replace humans with
automated systems that “can’t quit, forget or get pregnant.” Featuring a
visibly pregnant, smiling woman leaving the office with baby shower gifts, the
ads, which were published in leading business magazines, warned of employees
who “know too much for your own good” — “your good” meaning that of the
employer. Why be dependent on humans? “When Alice leaves, will she take your
billing system with her?” the ad pointedly asked, emphasizing that this
couldn’t be fixed by simply replacing “Alice” with another person.
The solution? Replace humans with machines. To pregnancy
as a “danger” to the workplace, the company could have added “get sick, ask for
higher wages, have a bad day, aging parent, sick child or a cold.” In other
words, be human.
I recently had a conversation with a call center worker
from the Philippines. While trying to solve my minor problem, he needed to get
a code from a supervisor. The code didn’t work. A groan escaped his lips: “I’m
going to lose my job.” Alarmed, I inquired why. He had done nothing wrong, and
it was a small issue. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
He was probably right. He is dispensable. Technology
first allowed the job to be outsourced. Now machines at call centers can be
used to seamlessly generate spoken responses to customer inquiries, so that a
single operator can handle multiple customers all at once. Meanwhile, the
customer often isn’t aware that she is mostly being spoken to by a machine.
This is the way technology is being used in many
workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them,
whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Many technological
developments contribute to this shift in power: advanced diagnostic systems
that can do medical or legal analysis; the ability to outsource labor to the
lowest-paid workers, measure employee tasks to the minute and “optimize” worker
schedules in a way that devastates ordinary lives. Indeed, regardless of
whether unemployment has gone up or down, real wages have been stagnant or
declining in the United States for decades. Most people no longer have the
leverage to bargain.
In the 1980s, the Harvard social scientist Shoshana
Zuboff examined how some workplaces used technology to “automate” — take power
away from the employee — while others used technology differently, to
“informate” — to empower people.
For academics, software developers and corporate and
policy leaders who are lucky enough to live in this “informate” model,
technology has been good. So far. To those for whom it’s been less of a
blessing, we keep doling out the advice to upgrade skills. Unfortunately, for
most workers, technology is used to “automate” the job and to take power away.
And workers already feel like they are powerless as it
is. Last week, low-wage workers around the country demonstrated for a
$15-an-hour wage, calling it economic justice. Those with college degrees may
not think that they share a problem with these workers, who are fighting to
reclaim some power with employers, but they do. The fight is poised to move up
the skilled-labor chain.
Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the
Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is
a little more education and better skills. But that is not a sufficient answer.
One historical example is no guarantee of future events, and we won’t be able
to compete by trying to stay one step ahead in a losing battle.
This cannot just be about machines’ capabilities or human
skills, since the true solution lies in neither. Confronting the threat posed
by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever
more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities.
It’s easy to imagine an alternate future where advanced
machine capabilities are used to empower more of us, rather than control most
of us. There will potentially be more time, resources and freedom to share, but
only if we change how we do things. We don’t need to reject or blame
technology. This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as
humans, and how we value one another.
Zeynep Tufekci is a contributing opinion writer and an
assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the
University of North Carolina.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 19,
2015, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Machines Are
Coming.
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