During the industrial revolution, many British farm workers protested as they feared that tractors and broad mechanization in agriculture would displace them at work. Of course, protests or no protests, mechanization continued. But over time, most of those workers moved into other sectors, with few people working in farming even as productivity and farm output improved in agriculture.
Fast forward today: “Some 45,000 U.S. dockworkers at ports along the East and Gulf coasts are back at work Friday after their union reached a tentative deal that provides a roughly 62% pay bump. …Among the concerns of the International Longshoremen’s Association is ensuring job security or upskilling as automation takes hold.”
Yes, men and women working in ports and wharfs went on strike to protect their jobs in this age where robots and AI are expected to take many jobs. Any victory will be temporary because the ports of the future will likely be fully automated as they have in China these days. But what is amazing in this protest is the requirement of “upskilling” where the workers are saying, if you do use robots to do our jobs, you can retrain us to be the people who will do the new jobs.
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I think we can learn from what is happening here: these workers are getting 62% bump even as they would be retrained. Simply, as AI comes, companies should explore how NOT to see cutting careers as the first solution. They can be nuanced on this, making sure innovation does happen even as families are not thrown under the bus.
You can argue that the dockworkers got this deal because they are unionized. That is correct. But we must not all be unionized before we can ask companies and business leaders to see families in this emerging automation redesign. People will lose jobs, but new jobs would be created, just as what happened during the industrial revolution.
But as that happens, there needs to be a way to ensure the process is not destructive to families. Political leaders have a role to play here to avoid a scenario where the 1% will expand their wealth even as the 99% are lost economically.
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If we are socially aware and conscious, we won’t be debating what to do with the people displaced by technology. The products and services companies churn out are to be paid for by people who earn money, if the people are jobless, no market then. We can as well ask each individual to launch a robot replica of himself/herself, so that while he/she enjoys and parties, the replica robot will be working and bringing in the pay. Either way, we must settle the people, else we will go 200 years behind once again.