We don’t write people off as “AI losers”

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The technologists were jolly, often hysterical to the point of annoyance. So it’s been a little disorienting lately to watch a parade of tech leaders issue public warnings about the dire potential consequences of their own inventions.

Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of the DeepMind artificial intelligence laboratory, recounted an event in San Francisco this month that AI would threaten white-collar workers and create “a serious number of losers” who would be “very unhappy, very upset.” Governments, she said, should think about how to compensate them.

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, was encouraging last week in congressional testimony about the potential for creating new jobs, but still said there would be an “impact on jobs” that “would require a partnership between industry and government, but mostly government action, to figure out how we want to mitigate that.

Good for them, one might say. Better to be honest about the potential risks automation poses for some workers than to be blindly optimistic. After all, everyone remembers learning of the Luddites in early 19th-century England, who were so angry that they resorted to destroying the weaving machines that had supplanted them. I would be OK with that. But I also think there is something dangerous about the narrative that AI will create winners and losers and that losers must be compensated.

It gives the impression that the outcome of technological change is inevitable and all we can do is get governments to absorb the consequences. But how AI changes the world of work is far from predetermined: it will depend on the balance of power in millions of different jobs; on legislation and regulatory enforcement; on the outcomes of the struggles over ideas, laws, working conditions and the distribution of productivity gains.

As economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue in their new book Power and progressso it has been throughout history, from medieval agriculture to the factories of the industrial revolution.

The Luddites are actually a good example. They weren’t against the technology itself so much as the way it was implemented to reduce their skills and replace them with substandard products made by unskilled workers or children. They turned to breaking machines out of desperation, but their demands weren’t unreasonable to 21st-century ears: Their ideas included minimum wages, minimum labor standards, and a tax on car owners to help support unemployed workers. . They just didn’t have the power to get anywhere.

There are echoes of those fears of undercutting and deskilling in the struggle going on in Hollywood today, between writers and studios over how AI could be used in the screenwriting process. Backed by strong unions, writers may be able to negotiate a more equitable way forward.

The other problem with the “make up for the losers” narrative is that it makes it seem like government is the only solution. This leaves companies off the hook and also implies that individuals have no agency.

A new policy in Sweden is a interesting example alternative approach: the country has created what is effectively a lifelong learning leave-type scheme. Under an agreement between employers, unions and the government, workers can take time off to train in something new, while being paid 80% of their salary (up to a limit).

This isn’t waiting for people to get fired and then offering them a cheap course so they can tick the “retraining” box in the “compensate the losers” manual (which it didn’t go so well in deindustrialized areas of many developed countries in recent decades).

Instead, the idea is to be proactive, to help workers keep up with changes in the world of work and to help employers by increasing the skills base of the workforce. It is still early days and there are some dangers, for example that it will replace the training provided by the employer.

But Swedish unions hope it “makes our members more secure in the job market and more resistant to the destructive forces that are always at work in a small, open economy,” says Fredrik Söderqvist, an economist at LO, the Swedish trade union confederation. “This kind of highlights a basic tenet of the Swedish model – security in the labor market should lead to individual job security – not the other way around.”

It’s time to stop saying that AI will produce winners and losers, as if the whole thing is out of our control. Create opportunities and dangers. How they play is up to us.

sarah.oconnor@ft.com