The Future of Work in Digital Age

We now find ourselves at a new turning point in history, in which the future of work as we understand it is in jeopardy. Since the Industrial Revolution, improvements in technology have led to the automation of many jobs that could once be done only by human hands and minds. This largely happened incrementally, but today, advancements in technology appear to be coming in leaps and bounds. All these developments have led (and will almost certainly continue to lead) to a more prosperous society — but they have also fundamentally decoupled productivity and job growth.

In light of these realities of the breakneck pace of improvements in automation and artificial intelligence, fears about job loss and human obsolescence are taking increasing space in the cultural imagination. The question looms: What is the future of human work in a technological age?

In A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and the Future of Work, Kevin J. Brown, professor of business at Asbury University, highlights the importance of overarching narratives, arguing that our vision of the human person plays a significant role in shaping our response to economic disruption. When human value is called into question, from what position or perspective will we respond?

Humanity has been deliberately designed and uniquely created. Thus, to understand human purpose, we must first understand the designer. Understanding the nature of God has direct implications for understanding our own nature as humans. We are told in the Qur’an that man was created as stewardesses on Earth. If we accept this line of thinking, there are several important implications for how we should understand human nature and purpose:

· First, every human being has an inherent dignity because he or she was deliberately created by God.

· Second, we have attributes of our creator inherent in our being. This, of course, does not mean we are like God or we are God — but it does mean that we bear his thumbprint. Therefore, we might say that when we produce, create, and relate, we are coproducing, co-creating, and co-relating with God. We are exercising these reflecting attributes.

· Third, this means that humans have an elevated status in God’s created order. Though all of creation originates from the creator, it is only human beings, we are told, that bear his likeness. In contradistinction to other creatures (including complex manmade machinery), humans can exercise both reason and will on the world. We can consider our circumstances, reflect on the past, and intuit the future.

· Further, we possess consciousness; that is, we have a sense of self, or what we often call agency.

· Finally, we are spiritual beings. We are not simply the sum of our biological components. Nor does our value merely rise to the level of our economic productivity. We have a spirit; a soul.

Brown offers the following three implications for how we think about and navigate the economic disruption of our age:

1. Metaphors matter:

As Michael Harris writes in his thought-provoking book “The End of Absence”, the largest database in the world, the most complex computer system, the most advanced adaptation of artificial intelligence “still lacks the honed narrative impulse of a single human mind.”

If humans are designed and resemble the productive, creative, and relational qualities of the Designer, then we should be entirely skeptical of attempts to compare humans to advanced computers, or any other organism.

If we conceptualize ourselves under the design narrative, then we have a new basis for appreciating human adaptability and malleability.

As economists like to say, when variables change, rational humans adjust their behaviors accordingly. These adjustments recruit the unique human qualities found in our embodied selves. That is, we have capacities for assessment, critical thinking, and problem solving (reason); we are characterized by free agency and obligation (will); we are constituted by cooperative interactions and find meaning and connection in others (relation); and we possess and regularly exercise compassion, goodwill, and commitment (emotion). Given this, comparisons of human personhood to computers appear, to borrow C. G. P. Grey’s expression, “shockingly dumb.”

2. Human ontology makes us unique (and thus difficult to fully replicate) in the economic realm:

In his book “Redeeming Economics”, John Mueller writes that since the days of Noah and Lot, people have been doing — and presumably will continue to do for as long as there are humans on earth — four kinds of things: “planting and building,” “buying and selling,” “marrying and being given in marriage,” and “eating and drinking.” In other words, we human beings produce, exchange, give (or distribute), and use (or consume) our human and nonhuman goods. We know in economics that value is created through the process of exchange. Trade and exchange relationships are not simply constituted by consumption, but by production. That is, economic activity cannot be understood in terms of consumption alone. As humans, we have productive capacities that are intricately tied to consumption and thus value.

Moreover, it is important to note that value is based on human conception, and such conceptions are conditioned by an ensemble of economic, social, political, moral, and spiritual factors that are often unique to individuals. Machinery, based on this conception of value, can neither confer nor create value in itself. It is always a function of human exchange, even if facilitated in some way, shape, or form through machinery. Among other things, this would make complete robotic substitution of human production and consumption impossible in an orthodox economic sense.

3. As a teleological creature, humans are endowed with moral and spiritual sensibilities:

Human-beings inhabit a moral reality. Therefore, in line with the Aristotelian tradition, human goodness is bound up with fulfilling human purpose: doing the thing we were designed to do. Virtually no mechanism in the world of automated technology accounts for this, even though it is a distinct dimension of the human experience.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt claimed that the technological corporate powerhouse can “make you smarter” if provided with enough of a user’s data. It should be noted though, that Google cannot make human-beings better. That is, Google can equip us with data-driven decision making, but it cannot imbue moral excellence or inculcate a deeper, more contemplative moral imagination.

The rise in automated machinery naturally gives rise to ethical quandaries based on how they are deployed. While this necessitates ethical programming in autonomous robotic entities, it fails to answer the question: whose ethics?

Indeed, in a 2012 Economist article titled “Morals and the Machine,” one author casually recommends that “where ethical systems are embedded into robots, the judgments they make need to be ones that seem right to most people.” While the comment is likely to gain acceptance in its presently generic form, presenting a specific ethical predicament is altogether unlikely to gain widespread acceptance among the masses. For example, consider a dilemma posed by Stanford University’s Chris Gerdes as it relates to autonomous automobiles: if a young child runs in front of a self-driving vehicle, should the car hit the child (likely killing the child) or swerve into an oncoming van (likely killing the vehicle’s passengers)? The expectation of achieving moral consensus for this or similar dilemmas is highly unlikely, thus supporting Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim that competing views of justice and ethical action is often “incommensurable.”

According to the deterministic narrative of technology, human-beings cannot keep pace with superior robotic beings in terms of productivity and processing, therefore, human capital as we know it is necessarily disposable because it is predicted to equal zero economic value. On the other hand, a faith-based narrative tells us that human-beings have a God-reflecting ontology and a deliberately designed teleology that makes us unique in the created order. While nothing in this narrative would fail to recognize or even applaud the innovative leaps and bounds inherent in technological progress, human beings created by God exist as the protagonist to this story. Thus, progress should not simply be seen as advancing information and productivity; it is about fulfilling the human purpose and submitting to God’s commands. As God mentions in the Qur’an:

“Devote thyself single-mindedly to the faith, and thus follow the nature designed by Allah, the nature according to which He has fashioned mankind; there is no altering the creation of Allah.” [30:30]

No one can exactly predict what the future of work will be. However, if we accept the faith narrative as our overarching metanarrative, we should humbly submit that we can indeed say what the future of work will not be: human obsolescence. The future of work is bright. Yet, we must first choose to see it.