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AI has potential to revolutionise working lives in a similar way to the plough

Predictions of mass unemployment as a result of technological progress are rarely borne out

AI has raised concerns about how it might displace humans from their jobs. Photograph: iStock
AI has raised concerns about how it might displace humans from their jobs. Photograph: iStock
Stuart Mathieson
Thu Jul 11 2024 - 06:00

After appearing to lag in the artificial intelligence (AI) race, Apple announced last month its new AI platform, Apple Intelligence. The new system’s integration with ChatGPT has drawn some criticism, since Apple has made user privacy one of its keystones and is expending great effort to reassure consumers their data will remain secure.

As the European Union continues its effort to become a regulatory superpower, the Digital Markets Act means Apple will delay the European roll-out of its AI platform until 2025.

In many ways, the Californian tech giant’s decision to incorporate AI reflects how deeply it is already embedded in our lives and our expectations about how technology will progress in the near future. Intelligent functions from email composition and image generation to identifying flowers, dog breeds, landmarks or dashboard warning lights are now standard smartphone features.

Large language models are being used to write everything from programming code to research paper summaries. What only a few years could have been uncharitably described as Googling or autocorrect with extra steps is now a mainstream and increasingly useful part of our everyday technological lives.

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As with any rapidly developing technology, and especially one that has the potential to automate repetitive, labour intensive tasks, AI has raised concerns about how it might displace humans from their jobs. Some groups have responded with protest and even sabotage.

Last summer in San Francisco, a group called Safe Street Rebel began disabling driverless robotaxis by placing traffic cones on their bonnet sensors. Although autonomous driving firms such as Cruise and Waymo have portrayed the protests as anti-technology or even anti-progress, the saboteurs have pointed to safety concerns and a resistance to treating a metropolitan area with millions of people living and working in it as a live testing facility.

The San Francisco case is so interesting precisely because the city is at the heart of American digital innovation. It is difficult to point to a location where progress and technology are so readily embraced, and even more difficult to believe that a region with almost half a million people working in the tech sector could be ideologically opposed to technology. These ideological leanings are sometimes described as Luddism or Neo-Luddism and associated with non-mainstream religious groups such as the Amish, or alternative lifestyles.

Ironically, Luddism takes its name from the Luddite movement, a 19th-century protest group that has been mischaracterised as hating or fearing technology. The Luddites were themselves named after a mythical weaver who smashed his stocking frame.

But they were also skilled machinists, who did not oppose technology per se, but rather the introduction of new, automated machinery that would allow textiles to be produced cheaper and more quickly, by lower-paid, less skilled workers. The resulting textiles were generally of inferior quality and therefore devalued a valued craft as well as threatening skilled, highly paid jobs.

The movement emerged in the north and midlands of England in the early 1810s, against a backdrop of social and economic upheaval caused by industrialisation, the Napoleonic Wars and looming conflict with the United States.

Operating by night, Luddites smashed mechanical weavers and sent threatening letters under the collective pseudonym of Ned Ludd. The British government responded with military force and introduced penal transportation and capital punishment for machine breaking as a further deterrent.

Repression was enough to quell the Luddites but couldn’t remove the tension between mechanisation and skilled labour. In 1830, it exploded in a series of protests, this time in the agrarian south and east of England. Agricultural workers saw the introduction of threshing machines, which would reduce the need for their labour, as an existential threat to their livelihoods.

Like the Luddites, these workers massed behind a mythological banner, sending warnings under the name of Captain Swing to landowners who bought threshing machines and carrying out a campaign of arson, sabotage and intimidation in support. The government response was again harsh, but the Swing riots petered out in 1831, and significant constitutional changes in 1832 moved the dynamic to a broader working-class struggle for political representation.

Technological progress has often been perceived as a threat to jobs. As far back as Jethro Tull’s seed drill, skilled workers have treated their potential mechanised replacements with suspicion.

But predictions of mass unemployment as a result of mechanisation have rarely if ever been borne out. Typically, workers have been freed to do more productive and interesting tasks. If treated carefully, AI has the potential to revolutionise our working lives in a similar way to the mechanical plough.

Stuart Mathieson is research manager at InterTradeIreland