Post 6

Summary: Job Automation

Companies, workers, and consumers are three key groups of stakeholders in the issue of job automation. The positive effects that job automation has on companies are connected to the four dimensions of McDonaldization – efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. The efficiency dimension is seen through the optimal assembly lines that companies can develop. The remaining three dimensions are seen through controlled, consistent, and measurable outcomes that result within companies that undergo McDonaldization. In other words, companies can replace repetitive tasks and, therefore, train employees to allow workers to focus on higher value-adding elements in the manufacturing process (R&D, process and quality control, etc.). The negative effects that job automation has on companies are recognizable in industries like fast food. “Fast” food restaurants typically have long wait times, unhealthy food, and produce tons of waste for the environment, yet they undergo McDonaldization to benefit their respective companies. Although companies have good intentions when implementing job automation (make profit, be efficient, innovate technology), the process can impact the goods they produce for consumers and the work their employees are assigned.

One of the positive effects that job automation has on workers was mentioned previously. Employees can be trained to focus on other aspects of their work in order to improve the company’s quality and such. However, a negative effect of job automation on workers is that there can be burnout due to the fact that people are hired and trained for a single, highly rationalized task in the assembly line. Employees can be so quickly and cheaply trained that workers become easily replaceable, since companies only need people to possess the minimum abilities to complete a task. Another negative effect is long-term job losses that will take place over the next decade or so. Companies would consider robot worker in the case that the minimum wage increases because it would be cheaper to purchase an expensive robot than to hire and pay an employee who is inefficient at their job.

Consumers are a third stakeholder in the issue of job automation. A benefit that consumers would experience as a result of job automation would be an increase in the abundance of the goods and services that they consume. Because companies will be focusing on being efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlled, consumers will be able to rely on companies to deliver more goods and services. A negative effect of job automation that consumers would experience is that goods and services may become very similar across different companies. Although assembly would be efficient, individuality is not encouraged. Job automation favors quantity over quality.

According to the Aristotelian ethical framework, the culpability of the engineers who design job automation systems that lead to human workers losing their jobs cannot be determined. As long as the engineers were leading virtuous lives – having neither lack or excess – they cannot be held accountable for what happens as a result of them doing their jobs. Aristotelians encourage the education of others to strive for that perfect state of balance and being knowledgeable in their field of work. These engineers are seeking to innovate technology – they are actively seeking to improve the lives of others and themselves and not accepting the way things are simply because it works.

Analysis: Job Automation

With the increasing rise of technology, many companies have started to realize that firing their workers and replacing them with robots could actually be more efficient and cheaper. Humans need to be paid an hourly or annual salary and be given numerous insurance and benefits, while robot workers are simply one upfront cost and then maybe some occasional maintenance costs. Some of the major pros to job automation is basically efficiency, money, and growth of technology. Historically, the use of technology has helped certain industries thrive (introduction of tractors to farming and rise of the industrial age). However, this new wave of technology might not actually help industries grow in the same way. Many companies have adopted the “McDonaldization” method of producing their goods to maximize efficiency. This method has four major positives: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control, and is thought to help companies thrive. The efficiency aspect is making a company have the best mode of production so it produce the most amount of goods possible. Calculability focusing on quantity over quality to maximize profits by selling the most products. Predictability focuses on making the look and process for the uniformity of the product. Lastly, the control aspect includes sometimes substituting human workers for automation and results in less expenses for the company. Many companies have claimed that doing this will not actually mean long term job losses and will overall benefit everyone in the company. From the computer scientists point of view, automation is great for their field because it really is innovative technology. Developing robot’s to perform jobs is a great breakthrough for rising technology.

However, from the side of the unskilled worker and the middle class, the rise of job automation has many flaws. Some of the major cons to replacing humans with robots is simply the job loss. While certain companies claim that adding automation will not result in job loss, the numbers simply do not lie (employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000). Many small town, unskilled workers will lose their jobs to these robots which in time creates many social issues. “Depression, spousal abuse, and suicide all became much more prevalent” after great job loss. Going back to the McDonaldization example, after studying the effects of the system, there were found to be not only some positive effects, but also three negative dimensions to the system. Irrationality, deskilling and consumer workers have come out of McDonaldization. When a system becomes almost too efficient, there can be negative side effects such as worker burnout, long lines for “fast” food, and great deskilling of workers. For example, on the Ford assembly line, while cars were then made much faster because each worker only specialized in one task, it meant a great deskilling of the workers. Before the assembly, workers knew how to make and fix many parts of the car, but afterwards, workers really only specialized in one small aspect of the car. Ford was then much more efficient and was able to have greater profits, but the now unskilled worker suffered. Now, with the rise of job automation, there is the threat of robots coming in and taking over that small task from the worker on the assembly line. Because these workers are unskilled, they then are unable to find a job after the robots have taken over their assembly line jobs.

Additionally, job automation has not proven to actually be all that much more efficient. So far, there have been little productivity effects of the technology revolution and while it might just take some time to have a big effect, there are already noticeable negative effects on the job market. Overall, while the rise of job automation is good for companies and efficiency, and for the growth of technology, there are dangerous side effects that greatly affect the middle class and unskilled worker. Job automation creates a great threat of job loss and might not even actually be that much more productive.

From the Aristotelian’s viewpoint, we would support the advancement of technology. The major point of Aristotle’s ethics is finding a golden mean of virtues to create the best society possible. Advancing technology can help with this, but only to an extent. We believe that Aristotle would encourage job automation to a point. Because there are many different pros and cons to job automation, it is hard to support either side. However, the Aristotelians would most likely support some job automation for the advancement of technology and manufacturing. We would support a system where job automation is used, but does not completely wipe out all jobs in replacement of robots. Using robots for certain jobs and on assembly lines could benefit society, but there are still many cons (explained above). That is why we would not support job automation to the point where it completely eliminates human interaction and replaces humans with robots in almost every job. Too much job automation would eliminate numerous jobs and have negative social effects on the middle and lower classes, but no job automation would stifle technological advancement. For example, the creation of the assembly line did deskill some workers because they were then only working on one specific part of the product. However, the assembly line increased productivity and reinvented the way humans manufacture goods. Citing specific aspects of the Aristotelian framework, having some job automation can help create a golden mean for productivity. There is therefore not an excess of innovation that causes unemployment rates to rise too much, but there then is not a lack of efficiency. This means Aristotelians would be in favor of having job automation in some aspects, such as in certain assembly lines or phone calling centers, but does not support the complete replacement of humans with robots.

Analysis: Self Driving Cars

Once a thing of sci-fi movies, driverless vehicles have made their way into our current reality. With various companies including Google, Uber, and Tesla investing heavily in the transforming transportation industry, automated vehicles stand at the forefront of this change. From personal vehicles like self driving cars and taxis, to larger systems like freight trucks, much of this self driving capability has already been created; it’s just a matter of testing and implementation.

Though seemingly ironic given recent publicity, the strongest argument in favor of self driving cars is safety. Data has shown that most road accidents occur because of human error; think about tailgating, road rage, distracted or drunk drivers… with autonomous vehicles, this alleviates quite a few hazards on the road! To put a number to it, studies have shown that autonomous vehicles could eliminate 90% of all auto accidents. Another benefit and argument for self driving cars is that there would be less traffic. If all the cars were linked to a common network and followed the actual rules of the road, buildups would be much less common. Again, human error is the main cause for traffic (merging, switching lanes too late, etc.). And on top of the safety and speed considerations, our capitalistic world would love the increased productivity of being able to work, text, and otherwise be distracted during their commute.

Meanwhile, there is also a group that is strongly opposed to the advancement and deployment of self driving cars. To start, many people doubt the “intelligence” of these systems and don’t feel that these cars will be safe (or up to the standard of safety mentioned above) until cars can be as smart as humans. Being able to perform a task does not equate to understanding, and operating a piece of machinery that correctly interprets so many edge cases is far from being developed. On top of this, the moral implications are vast. Should a scenario like the classic trolley switch dilemma arise, the machine must choose who dies or is injured. Will this truly be the decision of the machine, or will it be a hardcoded decision made by a programmer at the AV’s manufacturer?

Then there is the issue of hackers. Every computer system is at risk of being hacked, and self driving systems are no exception. The utopian view of self driving vehicles is that they will all be linked to a common network, communicate with each other, prevent crashes, and work in harmony. But, should a bad actor gain access to this network, they have the ability to not only cause havoc in the autonomous vehicle system as a whole, but also an array of data pertaining to the vehicle, driver, etc. These systems will use extensive amounts of data, as they essentially have to transform an entire world into a dataset. Creating the necessary safety nets for this would add years to the release of viable self driving systems. Perhaps autonomous vehicles are the way of transportation in the future, but currently, the infrastructure and incident preparedness is not at a place where legislation and consumers are ready to fully jump aboard. There are still many ethical and security questions that remain unanswered that need to be addressed before these armies of self driving vehicles hit the roads.

We hold the Aristotelian ethical framework to having an element of flexibility in its definition. This flexibility stems from the fact that it is based on “the golden mean;” in other words, almost anything can be identified as being virtuous as long as it balances the two extremes of being deficient and excessive in a certain quality. For this reason and because our group (as well as the majority of the class) is generally progressive about technological ideas, we believe that the Aristotelian framework would be in favor of self-driving cars.

To come to this decision, we thought about both the pros and cons of self-driving cars and realized that we if consider factors a certain way then it could be deemed ethical. For instance, think about the quality called “ambition.” The vice of deficiency in this realm would simply be “laziness” while the vice of excess would be something like “single-mindedness.” Certainly the goal of creating a network of self-driving cars by 20XX is an ambitious one so Aristotle would applaud human civilization for not being lazy. We could just very well stick to traditional cars but the fact that we are trying to develop self-driving cars shows that we are determined as a society.

At the same time however, it is clear from the pros/cons outlined in elsewhere in our post (gleaned from the readings on this topic), that humans are also being careful to not trap ourselves in the opposite extreme of being single-minded. Obviously, there is a lot to think about when developing self-driving cars since it does not exclusively come with benefits; sure, it takes away the occupation of sitting behind the wheel and could potentially make roads safer if every vehicle was synchronized to a traffic database but there are also potential dangers like malicious actors altering/entering this database and the fact that traffic will most likely be in a hybridized form (i.e. both computer-based and traditional drivers will be on the road at the same time) for a long time before becoming digitally homogenized so we also need to consider the tricky interaction between humans and computers trying to act like humans. The readings have shown that developers are having thorough discussions about these matters so this careful approach alone shows our group that this ethical behavior according to Aristotle; people are behaving in an “average” way between the two extremes of not doing anything and thinking they could do everything.

This idea of “molding” ideas as an average between two extremes can be applied to any of Aristotle’s other virtues such as honesty and temperance. As long as approaches to solutions of problems are carefully considered and both extremes of underdoing it and overdoing it are considered, it seems to us that Aristotle would be happy that we are acting in the “golden mean,” which is what ultimately enables to achieve Eudaimonia (a state of flourishing/happiness).