From Routine to Meaningful Activity
E-Book, Englisch, 396 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-56990-249-3
Verlag: Hanser Publications
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark
Using scenarios, Klaus Kornwachs examines the fields of work in which major AI-related changes can be expected and shows that major disruptions have already taken place in the past. You will find out what today’s developments mean and how to classify them without rushing to proclaim a new age.
The book offers an outlook on possible future work environments. Work will probably consist of more creative, less routine-based activities. The current employer-employee relationship will change from working to rule to defining and completing tasks independently. This is not a prediction, but a spectrum of possibilities that could result from the technological developments. There is always more than one option. To find out what we want, it is worth looking at the meaning of work as part of human existence. There are many different views on this, all of which are presented in the book.
After reading this book, some of the current discussions about the impact of AI on the working world will appear exaggerated to you. You will gain a better understanding of the limits of AI as well as our own limits. You will also be able to decide where AI can overcome those limits and where we need to set limits for ourselves.
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Preface It was in 1982 that Ralf Dahrendorf (1929–2009), once a hopeful FDP political newcomer and later president of the renowned London School of Economics, asked in the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT whether we were running out of work.1 His question was directed at the losers of the rationalization of industrial working life. According to his analysis, two factors could lead to the loss of jobs: on the one hand, the higher qualification requirements, which could cause previously well-qualified workers to drop out of the labor market, and on the other hand, the advances in automation, which could drastically reduce the supply of jobs. Later buzzwords such as “service society” or “knowledge society” were not yet in circulation. But what did Dahrendorf mean by work at that time? Did he mean the collectively agreed employment at that time, which contributed to the gross national product of Western countries mainly in the form of production activities? Or did he mean a fundamental change in work itself and its place in a person’s biography? Rather, Dahrendorf was asking whether a change in the world of work would lead to more or less of the same, or to something completely new coming on the scene. After the events of 1989, the question of work became more topical than ever before: The dissolution of the “Eastern Bloc,” as it was called, had abruptly changed the perception of a human-socialist design of the world of work that was still considered possible. The West seemed to have “triumphed” over socialism in praxi as well as over the utopian design of such a world of work, and in the West, market-liberal ideologies and their varieties began to dominate. What followed was a discussion about the “End of History,” as a much-discussed book2 was titled, and about globalization, which had begun long before 1989. It was about the privatization of public enterprises and services and about the first thoughts on the virtualization (then called e-work) of work. The “Future of Work” became one of the most frequently mentioned titles in publications and books.3 In the 1990s, after the reunification in Germany, discussions revolved around issues such as the right to (paid) work, the question of whether the new federal states would become the “extended workbench of the West,” unemployment in the industrialized countries, the worldwide relocation of jobs to low-wage countries, the widening income gap within and between states, often referred to as the North-South divide, the de facto withdrawal of the state from essential areas of public welfare, which can be observed in industrialized countries, the rise of neo-liberal thinking in economics and politics, the question of solidarity in an international labor market and beyond, whether an unconditional basic income would be a solution or an exacerbation of the fundamental problems addressed by these issues. All of this stood in strange contrast to the fact that, although much was written about work and its organization there was hardly any philosophical debate about work that would have been noticed by the German public in any significant way. However, the desire was already there at that time: This philosophical debate, i.e., the persistent questioning and illumination of the conceptual prerequisites of our talk about work and our life with work, should take place again and again in view of the rapid changes, and it should be conducted in a broad public. To date, the debate has been dominated by the question of whether rationalization through automation contributes to unemployment or to overcoming it. In the meantime, technological development in the world of work, in private and global communication, but also with regard to the indicators of the state of our planet4 has accelerated with a force that—phenomenologically—is reminiscent of exponential growth processes. Added to this was the politically intended global deregulation of international financial and capital flows as early as the 1970s,5 and with it the internationalization of markets and thus also of labor markets. In the two decades around the turn of the millennium (i.e., 1990–2010), these developments have led to massive shifts of coordinates in the world of work as well as in our general living environment, which such a philosophical discussion would have to take into account. It is therefore high time to rethink about work. In the years between 2010 and 2020, the development of modern communication and information technology has changed once again, with the buzzwords now being Industry 4.0, Big Data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. This transformation of the technical and organizational conditions of work, somewhat imprecisely referred to as “digitization,” has already significantly changed the content and forms of work and will continue to do so at an accelerated rate. It is precisely the exploitation of technical possibilities through the immensely increased availability of computing capacity and new programming techniques, also somewhat imprecisely called artificial intelligence (AI), that reinforces the impression that AI is re-spelling work. Around 2005, there was a tendency to dissolve the separation between work time and leisure time. Until then, except for artists, this separation had been seen as an essential dividing line within the structure of individual’s life plan, with consequences that extended into the realm of morals and duties. Categories of work now began to invade leisure, and moments of leisure began to invade the world of work.6 It was noticeable that many organizational-social developments were triggered by the technical development—not least the question of a dissolution of boundaries and thus a new determination of the place of work and working hours. The buzzwords “flexibilization,” “tele-cooperation,” and “teleworking” appeared, followed by “e-commerce”, “e-business,” and “home office” (= German term for “working from home”) as Anglicisms from the language of business economists and controllers. The demand for a reasonable relationship between working hours and self-determined time (now called work-life balance), changing mobility requirements, and an increasing segmentation of work biographies accelerated the perceived disappearance of familiar job profiles and lifelong skills. New job profiles emerged, most of them with English names, even in Germany. And once again, the coordinates of a discussion about work shifted. Since work cannot be conceived or understood without technology and technology cannot be conceived or understood without work, a discussion of the topic of work would also have to include the discussions on the philosophy of technology that have taken place in recent years. Here, there has been a change in the interpretation and understanding of technology in the face of its informatization (now called digitalization) and increasing biologization. These processes are still in full swing today and they have been accelerated due to the pandemic of the years 2020 and beyond. In many cases, we no longer fully understand all the steps and actions in our work, even if we wanted to and had all the necessary information at our disposal. Work has become more abstract than ever before. There are two reasons for this: One is the dependence of work on appropriate knowledge and skills, and thus the dependence on the availability of appropriate information at the right time in the right place. Secondly, the sensory perception of the work process—that is, what was done by hand—is disappearing behind the surface of the technology that supports or even replaces the work process. This, too, has led to a shift in coordinates as early as the 1980s, which sociologists have tried to analyze with the concept of the knowledge society. By now it should have become clear: The use of formal, i.e., ultimately mathematical, means changes the content, forms, and processes of human work. This ranges from the surveying used in the construction of the tunnel on Samos in ancient times to today’s artificial intelligence. We are already seeing glimpses of what this technology is capable of, but that is probably nothing compared to what is likely to come. Should we fear these changes or should we welcome them? Are we helpless at the mercy of an unstoppable force sold to us as progress? My answer at this point is a resounding ‘no.’ After all, all of us, experts and consumers alike, are also the ones who have unleashed this development, and therefore, as buyers of such technology, we are also responsible for shaping it. It is not artificial intelligence itself to be feared, but some of the business models that make AI possible in the first place.7 For this very reason, there can be a great deal of uncertainty and a pervasive feeling of loss of control. This book was written to do something about that feeling. It is...
