Stoic Ethics Post 6

Summary of Key Issies and Stakeholders in Job Automation

After reading the articles, there are a few key groups that stand out who will be impacted by the global trend of job automation. McDonalds is a key stakeholder in the issue of job automation. McDonalds strove (and really still strives) to completely rationalize all elements of their production line. They want to find the single most efficient method for completing each task. The effects of this are actually slightly irrational, which is a side effect of over-rationalized systems. Workers who are trained to do only one task burn out. From a business standpoint, workers with low skill sets are easily trained and easily replaceable, however employees have very little skills to offer to the job market. Another outcome of this system is that consumers start to do the tasks that workers traditionally did, like bussing tables and retrieving food, which decreases labor demands, but also decreases customer experience. 
Additionally, the Apple and Samsung supplier Foxconn replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots. The effects of this job automation were that many of the manufacturing tasks associated with the company’s operations are now completed by robots, and by consequence the workers who previously held those positions lost their jobs. The company claims that the employees who held these repetitive-task positions benefited from the takeover—they reportedly trained their employees and enabled them to focus on higher value elements in the manufacturing process like research and development, and process and quality control, which are jobs that require more skilled labor.
A less obvious group that is directly affected by job automation is the government. Not only would the decline in labor force literally upturn the tax and income distribution policy’s in America, but the American people would also expect more services and benefits to be provided to them by the government that had previously been provided to them via their jobs. There are also a number of societal and cultural changes that would need to be addressed that will arise from the transformation of country founded on hard work into a much idler society.
From a stoic’s point of view, the engineers involved in designing job automation systems that replace human workers would not be held ethically responsible for the job loss that resulted. A stoic might argue that as long as the engineer had pure and good intentions, acted rationally throughout the process and was striving toward bettering themselves and the world around them, they acted rightly. On that note, a worker who lost their job to an automated system would personally be ethically responsible for pursuing a more valued and virtuous skill, while the company who replaced their job in the first place would be responsible for helping to train and reposition that employee. The future of job automation can be understood by this process through the eyes of the Stoics. That is to say, automation should not be avoided or stopped for the sake of job security, but a consequence of this trend will be the demand for a broader personal responsibility that will require action from all parties that are affected. 

Analysis of Job Automation

Summary of Opposition to Job Automation

Job automation has not received universal support, and many are concerned about the socioeconomic impact that job automation could have. The first concern is mass unemployment. The simple fact is that the occupations of most of the people on the planet have existed for over a century. Whatever aspects of them have changed, they are generally based on simple interactions or mechanics, and most of the top ten sources of employment are facing some type of non-human replacement. The idea that all of these people can retrain into new jobs fast enough to maintain their standards of living is simply not realistic, it would require the creation of more jobs in these industries than exist right now, and that’s ignoring the fact that workers within a decade of retirement will be settling for entry-level positions in an incredibly bottom-heavy skill pyramid. This is not just speculation, US cities like Youngstown Ohio, have faced large-scale sudden unemployment on this scale before and no one seems to have any reliable means of handling this.

If the human cost is not an issue, then there are still practical concerns to trying to trust a majority of human productivity to automated labor. The primary issue is handling edge cases: how do we know if an automated system is able to perform reliably in all cases? And how bad are the consequences for these cases being handled poorly? As we’ve seen with self-driving cars the agreed upon test of efficacy seems to be to deploy the proposed autonomous solution and compare it to humans to see which does better, but if these new automated workers fail, then what should be done? It simply isn’t practical to re-create all of those lost jobs? And what toll could this enact on society?

Summary of Proponents of Job Automation

Proponents of job automation cite the economic and potential safety benefits of replacing human workers with mechanical laborers. It’s been accepted since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line that more work gets done when a job is divided into very simple tasks and workers are encouraged to focus on (and specialize in) these single tasks. Automating workers is just an extreme version of that, provide a machine that is purpose-built for its task that can perform it over and over again without breaking, and pay the pennies in electricity to operate it in place of the dollars in salary. Efficiency on this scale isn’t just good for a corporate bottom line either. Generally when the cost of production can be reduced by orders of magnitude prices can be expected come down as well.

Proponents would further argue that automation makes things safer. If there are no assembly line workers, then no one will die on an assembly line job. Whatever the economics details, job automation removes humans from dangerous situations and that should carry some ethical merit. And these ethical risks don’t require perfection in machines, they just require performance consistently above that of humans. It doesn’t matter if an automated worker consistently makes a mistake in a given scenario if the scenario is infrequent enough and the worker never suffers human errors in more common cases.

While the reduction in available jobs could eventually reduce the number of jobs to well below the number of able-bodied workers, proponents of job automation remind us that this is not necessarily going to happen nor does it have to be a bad thing. Many have hypothesized on what an economy whose necessities required a minority of the population and nobody has conclusively disproved the possibility of a pure creative economy, or an economy that finally begins to replace all of the human interactions that machines had begun to phase out. There is even a chance that society could adapt past a need for labor to drive exchange. After all, does anyone need to do anything once all of mankind’s needs can be provided for effortlessly? As distant utopian as this may seem, it works in the extreme case that would make mass unemployment a problem.

Stoic Examination of Job Automation

Stoics are generally indifferent to jobs. If the highest purpose of life is to obtain virtue, and the pathway to virtue is through application of reason, then there is no task aside from the application of reason that is intrinsically necessary for human existence. While it can be reasoned from psychological study that there are other activities that are necessary for a healthy existence (health is particularly useful in the pursuit of virtue), none of these are directly tied to being employed. Put another way, nothing about trading labor for means of survival seems necessary to human existence. Stoicism would be perfectly happy with a post work society in which everyone is free to pursue happiness through reason, but at the same time there is no proof that such a lifestyle would be necessary, or even preferred, for teaching a virtuous lifestyle.

Thus there is no way to label job automation as categorically bad, but nothing proving it universally good, either. Stoics define true goodness in a thing as being good in all cases, and whatever one’s stance on the merits and evils of job automation, one has to acknowledge that job automation, when approached in the wrong way can cause lasting harm to a majority of the labor force, which is of course an objective wrong in the eyes of Stoicisim.

It is important to define what constitutes harm to a Stoic in these contexts. As a rational framework, Stoicism defines harm in a Utilitarian sense. Causing harm to one person is permissible in cases where there was harm-free option and more harm would have been caused to all people in the long term. Because perfection is an unreachable goal, Stoicism favors a reasonable plan, and therefor values intentions. It is therefore permissible to advance forward with a plan that does not yield benefits, as long as a rational case could be made for the plan that was carried out should cause less harm than is currently being experienced.

Stoics are fine with the idea of a post-work society, but there are certain transitional stages that, if handled poorly, would be impossible to condone. Any situation that could cause injury to large groups of people must be avoided, in this case the most obvious sources for injury are mass unemployment while society still expects all of its able-bodied members to maintain employment, and any harm inflicted by mechanical workers that humans would definitely have avoided (the easy example here would be self-driving cars hitting pedestrians). If intentional efforts are made to mitigate this damage to the point that the resultant world should be as good or better than a world without automation, then Stoicism has no reason to oppose it.

Analysis of Self-Driving Cars

Summary of the Opposition to Self-Driving Cars

Many concerns have been raised in the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) regarding their immediate safety threat and the ethical dilemmas they introduce to society. The technology of AVs has progressed faster than regulation and largely decisions on regulation have fallen to the state level. Many state officials have been persuaded to loosen regulations on AV testing on public roads to entice AV companies to bring business to their cities. These lower regulations and the variation across state lines has resulted in a current testing system where safety standards are unclear and it’s hard to track where AVs are tested. The public is not always aware that they are sharing the road with self-driving cars, which makes many people uncomfortable. Some state officials are lenient towards AV companies because they see them as having pure intentions, but already concerns have been raised if these companies may be placing more value in innovation than safety. In early stages of testing accidents and fatalities have been reported. When companies cut safety measures it is only discovered in investigations after an accident and at all times the algorithms behind AV decision-making remain relatively unknown due to company trade secrets. One important safety distinction has been the presence of a backup driver in the car, but even with a human driver the driver is prone to distraction or could be too slow to take control of a vehicle in a fast-paced situation. The question arises whether it is ethical to experiment with technologies that endanger lives in the name of future increased safety. While Toyota and other companies have stated that accidents are expected as part of the process, it is difficult to name death as the price of progress.

Many new ethical dilemmas have also risen as a result of AVs on the road, with uncertainty of who would take responsibility for many scenarios possibly encountered by autonomous cars, such as in the event of a crash. There is also uncertainty in how software engineers can ethically pre-program responses to certain situations where there is a choice of outcome and choice of whose safety should take precedence: the passenger or others. It is a difficult ethical question to ask consumers to sacrifice their own self-interest for predetermined algorithms but these are decisions that are being asked with development.

Many more problems come with the introduction of AVs. AVs would eliminate all driving jobs, a prolific profession in the US. They would be an environmental concern as they would increase traffic and pollution and, at least currently, pose a threat to pedestrians and people choosing to bike. They would also necessitate large investments in revamping infrastructure, such as updating mapping systems and fixing lane lines. They would also facilitate a society where people would become less aware of their surroundings and even more dependent on technology. There would be many new implications of a society with AVs and currently many posed problems have no solution.

Summary of Proponents of Self-Driving Cars

The most advertised promise of self-driving vehicles is that they will greatly increase safety on the roads. Advocates believe the roll-out of AVs could prevent around 35,000 deaths each year that would otherwise occur due to human error behind the wheel. Currently, 43 percent of car crashes (in the US) happen at intersections. According to University of Pennsylvania’s Peter Stone, if AVs were ever to comprise most of the vehicles on a road, then a crash would only occur at an intersection if there was a mechanical error of some sort. While AVs have not gathered enough data yet to confirm the theory, many believe self-driven cars will significantly reduce the mortality rate on the roads.

There are numerous other benefits to self-driving cars. Mathematician Remi Tachet des Combes says that autonomous intersections could cut back on carbon-dioxide emissions by 20 to 50 percent. This is because human-driven cars idle and perform “jack-rabbit starts” far more than AVs. According to Tachet des Combes, this is the “most expensive and pollutive part of driving.” Another team of researchers, led by Rutgers University-Camden scholar, Benedetto Piccoli, found that some self-driving cars could reduce fuel consumption by up to 40 percent and braking events by up to 99 percent.

For the average consumer, using a self-driving car would allow them to spend their time resting or working instead of focusing on the road. It would also allow those who are not allowed to drive (due to disability or other reasons) to independently commute without having to resort to public transportation. Additionally, many estimates have commute time decreasing in a world with self-driving cars.

By reducing the chance for accidents, pollution emitted from vehicles and increasing customer convenience, self-driven cars appear to be a future worth pursuing for many.

Stoic Position on Self-Driving Cars

Despite the potential short term harm as a direct byproduct of developing autonomous vehicles, a Stoic would see the logic built into these machines and recognize that each decision it makes is done so with reason behind it. This rationality would lend a Stoic to favor AVs. While there are inherent biases in the programming of the vehicle, it is in the best interest of the corporation developing it to keep safety as its highest priority. With that being said, of course there will be vehicle collisions along the way. However, it is reasonable to foresee that the lessons learned from any individual AV’s collision can be communicated to other AV developers, leading to exponential improvement in safety with each mistake. Moreover, any initial detrimental economic effect could be offset by the jobs provided by the various requirements of a growing AV network. While some professions, such as truck drivers, would be out of luck in the short term, most would certainly have enough time to either learn another skill or relocate to a place with higher demand for them before they get phased out by autonomous trucks. Ultimately. due to the built-in rationality of AVs and the potential for increased safety, travel efficiency, and environmental responsibility, it is a clear choice for Stoics to support this endeavor.