Universal Basic Income: Silver Bullet to the Home-Maker’s Automation Cataclysm?
Our perception of technology has always teetered on the edge between utopia and dystopia. Still fresh in one’s mind the utopian, technologically abundant world portrayed by the 2008 film “Wall-E” where people like us are pampered by intelligent robots to the point where moving their feet is considered superfluous. Though morbidly obese and exceptionally lethargic, this hypothetical rendition of what our future might entail implied a content and pompous version of ourselves, seemingly without disdain. And such is the utopian depiction of our future. Peering into the other side of the spectrum, or some might regard it the more realistic rendition of our future, life isn’t the lavish and exuberant wonderland portrayed in many modern works in pop culture.
Quoting Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, “to do some work is a part of our personal dignity”and thus to lose our job is to lose a part of our dignity. Too often have we seen cases where technology has succeeded in seizing our jobs. These cases are neither novel nor rare. One famous case dating back to the 1800s involved the replacement of humble mill workers by a power-loom. The owner of Rawfords Mill (the mill in question), William Cartwright, had adopted a power-loom which was able to make redundant the jobs of 4 workers. Angered by said job displacement, these offloaded workers, who named themselves the “Luddites”, congregated and scheduled a protest of which later was proven to be deadly, causing the deaths of at least 6 men. More modern-day examples are also abundant. Take for instance, the case of Collin, a toll collector working in San Francisco. His job involves a loop of menial tasks such as greeting commuters, giving directions, etc. Such looped activities are exactly what AI excels in. Sure enough, exacerbated by the global pandemic, in mid-March, Collin and 185 other toll collectors in Northern California have been offloaded due to the usage of an automated toll payment technology.
Zooming out and viewing through the macro perspective, the prospect of technological job replacement is horrifying. Though the numbers vary, one conclusion that can be conjured is that AI will usurp a significant number of jobs. A 2018 working paper by the OECD dichotomized job replacement risk into two, jobs with at least a 70% chance of being automated and jobs with an automation risk of 50–70%. Results show that 14% of jobs across OECD’s 32 members are included in the former job replacement risk criteria while a further 32% are included in the latter. The World Economic Forum released this year’s “The Future of Jobs Report” in which they presented a slew of alarming results. The report states that based on their estimations, as many as 85 million jobs might be displaced by machines. Additionally, their survey results (also presented in the report), of which they conducted on a number of businesses, states that 43% of businesses would reduce their workforce due to technological integration.
Home-maker, Child-bearer, Risk-bearer
Such numbers only present a helicopter view of the general repercussions of technological progress and integration in jobs. However through further scrutiny, a certain group of human beings are more disadvantaged than the other. This special group are the life-givers themselves, women. Even without the looming threat of automation, women’s labor participation has been poor and has dwindled throughout the years. Globally, the female labor force participation rate has considerably declined since the year 2000. In 2019, only 47,1% of the adult (above 15) female population participated in the labor force globally, a miniscule number when compared to the 50% female labor force participation attained in 2000. The numbers in Indonesia are even more dismal as only 50,7% of the adult female population participated in 2018. Such low numbers are even more alarming when put into context as neighbouring ASEAN countries such as Thailand managed to attain a considerably higher female labor force participation rate at 60,3%. Women have been touted as the more susceptible gender to job automation risk.
As can be inferred from the graph above, a considerable portion of women’s jobs are susceptible to automation. Even in America, a country perceived highly by the world population, 24% of women’s jobs are susceptible to displacement by technology by 2030. Part of the reason why is the nature of their jobs. A 2019 Mckinsey report stated that in emerging economies, 40% of women are employed to do clerical support occupation. Such occupations involve mainly looped and routine work. This phenomenon is paradoxical as though women are naturally endowed with skills which should make them better equipped to be employed in more “humanized” and high-skilled jobs (Cortes et al., 2018), historical gender division has allocated women in said clerical occupations. Ever since the cold war, a woman’s job has been characterized as mechanized and structured. Women were left with said jobs as men were afraid that their skills would be made superfluous due to automation and abstained from said mechanized employment opportunities. Additionally, women’s employment opportunities are more scarce as opposed to men’s, leaving women with little power to choose more high-skilled jobs.
According to Eric Weinstein, an economist and mathematician, AI excels in exactly that type of occupation where women have continued to dominate for decades. The more cognitively tolling and “humanized” (with high emotional requirements) the job, the more difficult to automate. Such is exactly the reason why 52% of potential female job displacements are accrued by aforementioned clerical support occupations. In the case of Indonesia, women also tend to be employed in occupational sectors with high automation risk. In 2017, 13,7 million (30%) Indonesian women are still employed in the agriculture, fisheries, and forestry sector. Referring to the chart below by “The Economist”, occupations in the agricultural sector is endowed with around a 58% automation risk, among the top 5. This result is consistent with Mckinsey’s findings in India where agricultural jobs accrued to 28% of total estimated female jobs usurped by automation.
Massive Redistribution : The Long Awaited Silver Bullet?
It is naive to assume that our naturally bounded capabilities as human beings are able to catch up to or, even more naive, stop the freight train of technological progress. Though hypothetical (albeit likely), it is still imperative to consider the circumstance of human labor displacement. The future is not all gloom, however. Oscar Wilde’s sentence, of which he proclaimed in his much acclaimed masterpiece “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, restates humankind’s goals clearly as he said “Were that machine the property of all, everyone would benefit by it”. To pick the fruits of progress and ensure the even redistribution of such harvest to all of humankind is indeed the penultimate goal of current civilization. How? One might ask. How can the tables be turned to our favor? The answer is massive redistribution through Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI would ensure at the very least some level of sustenance by ensuring an unconditional regular income to all.
The idea of UBI itself is not novel as it dates back to the fifteen hundreds when Thomas Moore proclaimed it in his book Utopia. And that’s what UBI was known as for long; a utopia. Desperate times call for desperate measures; and attaining the seemingly unattainable is one of those measures. One complication of which has hindered the widespread application of UBI is its source of funding. The funds required to “make it rain” on a huge number of the population is equally large. It is estimated that Andrew Yang’s UBI plan would cost $2,8 trillion per year to implement. Though intimidating in the current sense, one must take note of technological progress’ ability to increase the economic pie (Korinek and Stiglitz, 2019). According to an estimate by the PwC, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to contribute up to $15,7 trillion in 2030 globally and $3,7 trillion in the United States alone. Such numbers still exclude the potential spillovers to other sectors of the global economy which, if internalized, would inflate those numbers even more. Thus it is safe to say that in the foreseeable future such a utopian idea is very affordable. With the issue of its feasibility settled, we may now proceed to the potential economic benefits that can be gained especially by women through UBI and how it is one possible solution to AI domination.
One phrase of which is synonymous with UBI is income security. One of UBI’s sole purposes is to provide some degree of income security, just enough to sustain day to day life. Such a purpose has increased in urgency considering the potential massive amounts of jobs lost due to AI’s destructive properties. Though scarce, some empirical evidence has gone to show the overall positive impacts of local UBI implementation. Uganda has been one country of which has tried the UBI experiment a handful of times. One of the experiments was conducted by the Ugandan government by giving $150 to over 1800 poor women in the country’s north. The experiment resulted in a 100% increase to their income. Another experiment was done by “Give Directly”, a non profit organization, in which they distributed $500 cash to the impoverished citizens of Western Kenya. A further study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that Give Directly’s unconditional financial aid resulted in a 38% increase in lasting income. It is a great shame that not many experiments have been conducted to test the potency of UBI but the select empirical data has been able to provide ample evidence of UBI’s impact on the recipients’ income security.
Referring back to women’s jobs’ high degree of replaceability, to ensure a woman’s income security even without being employed by a formal job is of utmost importance. Women are a peculiar case as even when their formal occupations are plucked by AI, they still have the responsibility of being housemakers. Women are then burdened with extra responsibilities such as child care and housework of which in some cases takes priority above formal occupations. Women would then have to distort and adjust their work hours to accommodate their childrens’ needs which would then result in lower income levels (Alstott, 2001). Such cases of added responsibilities and risks of lower earnings warrant the need of increased income security which can be provided by UBI. Such tolling chores such as childbearing, child rearing, etc., are not compensated by any monetary means. Regardless of automation being prevalent or not, UBI’s ability to compensate such otherwise unpaid labor is of great need in providing women with lasting income security (Parker,1993).
One looming fear which has dissuaded the public from agreeing with the idea of UBI is its hypothetical threat of deterring its recipients from working. Countless novel studies have succeeded to show that UBI is unable to influence employment. RCT studies conducted in six countries (including Indonesia) has proven that the presence of UBI does not influence individuals’ working hours of any statistical significance (Banerjee et al., 2017). A study conducted by SMERU on “the behavioral effects of unconditional cash transfers” also resulted in the same conclusion, further debunking the notion that UBI will result in decreased working hours.
The formerly unattainable, utopian solution of simply “giving people money” might prove to be the rainbow at the end of this technological dystopia. Though commonly misbegotten, this act of beneficence is one sure fire way to inject income security to the most income insecure group of unsung heroes. The days of unpaid housework and low earnings should be long gone and the momentum of automation exacerbates the abolishment efforts of those unfair treatments. At the end of the day, whichever path humanity decides to take to solve this technological predicament, one penultimate goal must be kept in mind: to pluck the fruits of progress.
Written by: M. Faisal Harits
Edited by: Sendy Jasmine
Illustrated by: Della Annisa
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