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Workplace automation and political replacement: a valid analogy?

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Abstract

A great deal of theorizing has emerged about the economic ramifications of increased automation. However, significantly less attention has been paid to the potential effects of AI-driven occupational replacement on less measurable metrics—in particular, what it feels like to be replaced. In politics, we see examples of nation-states and extremist groups invoking the concept of replacement as a motivator for political action, unrest, and, at times, violence. In the realm of workplace automation, and in particular, in the case of AI-driven workplace automation, the replacement of human labor with artificial labor is an explicit goal. In this paper, we suggest that, given the effects that the experience of a sense of replacement has in political contexts and the potential for that sense of replacement to motivate unrest and violence, we should be concerned about the widely predicted replacement of workers over the coming decades beyond the potential economic challenges which may arise.

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Notes

  1. Renaud Camus is a French writer, political activist, and nationalist. In the 1970s and 80s, he was a member of France’s Socialist party and wrote a few successful novels which were influential in LGBTQ communities. By the late 90s and early 2000s, Camus had become a radical nationalist and began expounding his Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

  2. For a detailed discussion of these components, see Eisikovits, forthcoming.

  3. Note that we are using the term “white nationalist” here. The “white supremiscist” position would add some inherent inferiority of non-white ethnicities and consequent superiority of their own ethnicity. While in practice, these ideologies tend to be advocated in tandem, we are focusing here on the former.

  4. The literature on workers attitudes towards workplace automation includes texts such as Ivanov et al. [20], Nam [28], and Brougham and Haar [5].

  5. Granulo et al. [17] is an exception to this general dearth of interest in exploring the internal experiences of workers replaced by automation.

  6. Many commentators on the ethical risks of AI systems worry about algorithmic bias—the ways in which algorithms perpetuate and reify existing social biases. See for example O’Neil [29], Danks and London [8], and Eubanks [13]. While these concerns are certainly merited and important, algorithmic bias can, in principle, be addressed if the political will and commercial motivation exist to diversify the coders and quality control the models they create. And, in fact, other commentators argue that machines have the potential to operate with greater equity than human judgment can. See for example Eisikovits and Feldman [10].

  7. Consider, for example, the loss of socialization opportunities or the stresses that accompany the loss of income. Additionally, these factors are further complicated by considerations such as gender role, familial role, age, social support, and more [2, 36].

  8. However, even if the above hypothesis is true, it is still possible that sufficiently wide scale automation of low skill, low wage may still lead to social unrest if automation quickly and significantly reduced the availability of such positions. Having a job, providing for oneself or one’s family, being useful—at a more general level, these elements contribute to a sense of self-worth and their absence would reasonably contribute to social unrest and backlash.

  9. It is beyond the scope of the current discussion to build-out how such a shift (from a loosely organized collection of individuals to an identity group) occurs, both in theory and in practice. Social identity theory may be a fruitful means of framing this shift from occupational replacement to political replacement by examining how individuals self-categorize into social groups.

  10. For an important recent example of this approach, see Case and Deaton [6].

  11. The concept and literature of dehumanization may be another interesting way to frame this feeling of ‘replaceability’. However, much of the literature about dehumanization approaches the concept from an objective normative position, i.e., it seeks to tell us under what conditions we ought to consider someone to have been dehumanized and, by extension, what dehumanization consists of [18, 31]. However, the question of what dehumanization feels like from the first-hand perspective and what reactions this might tend to produce is a less thoroughly explored topic and warrants further investigation.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Applied Ethics Center, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Jake Burley & Nir Eisikovits

  2. Applied Ethics Center, Boston, USA

    Jake Burley

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Burley, J., Eisikovits, N. Workplace automation and political replacement: a valid analogy?. AI Ethics 3, 1361–1370 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00245-6

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