Judy Wajcman has spent her career studying the effects of technological change on society and work. She thinks AI will improve our lives in many ways, but there are limits to what it can do. “I’m disturbed that our imagination of the future is taken up with technology, rather than a society and a politics that we would want”. In this Q&A with Sophie Mallet, she talked about everything from universal basic income to the use of AI in diagnostics, education and care work.
How real is the threat that AI will replace jobs?
A lot of people think about artificial intelligence as a general-purpose technology, like electricity, that will have effects on everyday life, employment and lots of things, but this will take decades to work through. The best economists conclude that it’s early days and we really don’t know.
The nuance of automation working alongside jobs, rather than replacing them, is less compelling to us. Why is that?
Partly because economists use abstract models. If you want to measure something abstractly, the easiest thing is to look at specific tasks and use a tool like ChatGPT. If part of the task is drafting an article, then we can use this technology to do that.
The discussion in Hollywood about their creative writing doesn’t capture a lot of forms of labour. Making formulaic TV series will be much easier to do with ChatGPT. But technology doesn’t replace the creative, interesting, inspiring elements of that work.
It’s not a matter of replacing [jobs], but of changing the skill base and the nature of the work.
At educational institutions, everyone’s worried about students using these technologies to write their essays. I don’t want to sound facile about it, but we have to adjust to new forms of knowledge and new kinds of technologies with new ways of teaching. Our dream scenario would be to let students write the essay using technology and then talk to them about what are original essays that make a contribution to knowledge. I don’t buy that we’ll just replace traditional teaching with AI and personalised tutoring. It’s just a handy story for marketing those technologies.
What in our jobs can’t be automated?
All people see is the cutting-edge engineering work. They don’t see other forms of labour that are necessary for that work to occur. In Silicon Valley, workers still provide lunch, and cleaners make sure campuses looks beautiful. The service labour that helps keep those engineers working, a huge amount of labour, is undervalued.
Much of the psychologically stressful work is contracted out. Workers in places such as India and the Philippines are being paid to go through the social media content that is unpleasant, violent and horrible to look at.
When I was doing work in Silicon Valley about automated assistance, I discovered that often behind them were women answering the calls. The company was making exaggerated claims for what the artificial assistant could do. Loads of labourers made up a lot of the details. We’re told that work will eventually be automated. Tech companies go through phases in which they try to automate the downstream bits. But many systems are less frictionless than we’re told.
Why do tech companies sell us the idea that automated jobs perform better?
I’ve been critiquing the mainstream notions about AI, work and the fear of automation. But I want to say upfront that this technological revolution will do amazing things. Do I want cancer diagnosis to improve? Do I want more accurate scans than humans do? Yes! Technologies are immensely more predictive than they ever were before. AI is a broad term that covers different kinds of technology. I worry that people don’t differentiate between applications. AI will be terrific for diagnostics and measuring energy, but not for educating kids at school.
We need to ask ourselves what kinds of work we want automated or not. Nobody would think it’s a great idea to put our kids in a nursery where only machines interact with them. We need to think more carefully about what we want to use the technology for.
My overall concern is that the Big Five tech companies have phenomenal power and control over the design of the technologies, making decisions for us about what they will look like. For instance, they are making decisions to design social media to capture our attention.
Some say that parents should control their children’s social media, as if we, rather than the designers of the technology, were individually responsible. I’ve been arguing one thing my entire career: we must focus on design, not putting the responsibility on consumers. What are they designing it for?
Who controls the tech narrative about the future?
AI will be terrific for diagnostics and measuring energy, but not for educating kids at school.
At the moment, Silicon Valley occupies our imagination of the future. When you ask people about the future, they will often talk about fantastic technologies. I worry about how much our visions are taken up with technological change rather than politics. We should still have utopian thoughts about a society that’s more equal, satisfying and just. We don’t have to fill our imaginations with technologies.
People feel pressed for time. Technology companies say the solution is to automate everything, from email replies to relationships. They promise that the more technology you have, the more you free up your time. I’s a narrow vision of the future, like in the Flintstones.
The best way to buy time is to buy someone else’s labour that is cheaper than yours. I live in a block of flats, and I’m stunned at how many people come to deliver food. Somebody has put the food together somewhere else and has brought it to you. AI is not producing the food and saving you time.
Why does it benefit tech companies to say technology saves us time?
Because the core of productivity is doing more in less time. Technology is always sold as making us more productive. Firms will spend a fortune on technologies to make workers more productive and profitable. Productivity is about time. In the household, cooking efficiently, doing things efficiently is about saving time.
Every year, the big companies make sales pitches about the latest versions of their products. It’s ironic that their narrative is often about allowing you to use your own time wisely. This implies that some tasks are valuable, and others aren’t. We need to question these assumptions. Think of a nursing home. In my own experience with my mother, I remember observing particularly daughters sitting in the nursing home, like I was, not doing a lot, just using their time in a way that has nothing to do with technology and can’t be automated. It’s incredibly precious time. How does one even start thinking about what they would do with that time?
In Stanford, I visited a workshop called Coding for Care. People came to pitch their ideas, which were basically about surveillance. They said they could be sitting in Palo Alto and watching what their mother was doing at home because they installed fantastically good technology in her house. If she fell, they would immediately find out. I was one of two Europeans at this conference. And we both immediately said, “what about collective care?” Is it the only model, for older people to remain on their own?
Entrepreneurs build technologies and then look for problems to solve using them. Many problems don’t – or shouldn’t – exist. They start looking at applications for their technology rather than starting with genuine social needs and then designing the technologies to deal with them.
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton says that technology will take away drudge work and only plumbing will survive as a job. Why does that leave you shaking your head?
That bothers me. What is drudge work? During the pandemic essential workers did the work no one was interested in, because it is poorly paid. But it was exactly the work that kept society going while wealthier people could sit at home. If you could afford it, had a big enough house and garden, you didn’t have to go out. Nobody thought about the people doing the delivery, taking the risks, driving the buses and dying in hospitals. I find this notion of drudge work awful.
It’s interesting how quickly debates come in cycles. Universal basic income was a big topic a few years ago. In Silicon Valley there was this myth that all jobs would be automated, there would be no jobs left, and the tech bros would work 24/7 because they’re doing interesting work. Of course they wouldn’t work any less or share their work out more equitably, but us plebs would be given a universal basic income and we’d be able to survive.
In a way, our experience with the pandemic finished this debate. To keep society going during the pandemic, you needed bus drivers more than you needed financial analysts and hedge fund managers. Their importance was inverted. This discussion about the universal basic income lost some traction then.
… our experience with the pandemic finished the universal basic income debate. To keep society going, you needed bus drivers more than you needed financial analysts and hedge fund managers.
There’s this idea that if we just automate everything and increase efficiency, we’ll have more leisure time. What do you think of that?
I’m very keen on four-day week experiments, shorter working days and a fairer distribution of work. It’s a terrible thing that we live in a society where groups of workers have to put in incredibly long hours, without a choice. Even senior corporate management jobs could be shared. You get much more work from two people job sharing than you do from one person doing a full-time job, particularly when you have two women sharing.
Software guys in California work day and night with their start-ups, expecting to get rich at 40 and retire. Why live like that? Why not share out the work more, have a more normal, enjoyable life? What is this crazy thing? I think the way work is organised is crazy. Why don’t we have a society in which when you have kids you work fewer hours? Let alone working in retirement? We’re in the 21st century hanging on to these 20th century notions of work.
How can the peoplewho consider they do amazing, creative work want to work all the time? How can they think about other people not having access to interesting and enjoyable work? Having a job and a function is incredibly important to identity and shouldn’t be denied. It’s weird for those people who have it to tell us to live differently.
You say the way the future is presented to us is marketing concocted by the Big Five…
I’m disturbed that our notions about the good life, the future, our imagination and what we think of as utopia are taken up with images of future technologies rather than a society and a politics that we would want… I’m struck by the space that the technological narrative takes up.
There was a time when companies had to pay for advertising their products. But now when Big Tech has a new product, newspapers treat it as if it’s news. It’s like journalists are completely seduced by the wealth of these companies.
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- This Q&A represents the views of the interviewee, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
- Featured image courtesy of Judy Wacjman. All Rights Reserved.
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