The Impact of AI on Labour Productivity Essay Example

Artificial intelligence (AI), once a pipe dream, now a very real reality, has revolutionised modern-day society, reshaping the social contract and the economy. However, it could be a powerful opportunity to raise labour productivity. 

A strategy to utilise AI to do so should be to incorporate AI as general support to all professions, whether white-collar or blue-collar. For instance, according to Coursera, AI increases the accuracy of doctors’ diagnosis, their predictions regarding patients’ future health and recommendations for patients (Rajpurkar, P, 2021). Moreover, according to Trimble, AI also supports blue-collar professions such as construction. General contractors use AI to monitor on-the-site risks so that they can focus their time and resources on more major risks instead, thus increasing productivity.(Rao, S, 2021, July 9). This shows how AI can offer general support to all professions to lift labour productivity for all workers. 

This has many benefits. Productivity-wise, AI relieves some of the workload, limited resources like manpower could be maximised to tackle more major priorities, boosting labour productivity (Rao, S, 2021, July 9). Moreover, it minimises error rate. According to Statista, AI error rate in 2017 is less than half as much as the human error rate (Liu, S. (2019, September 6). Thus, with AI covering some tasks for humans, fewer errors would be made. Feasibility-wise, it is shown above that such AI has already seen implementation in industries (Rajpurkar, P, 2021);(Rao, S, 2021, July 9) , meaning that AI need not be developed much further for this strategy, thus this strategy is feasible. Socially, this improves occupational safety since AI can take over more dangerous tasks instead of humans. For instance, AI like the SmokeBot is used to monitor incident sites for firefighters, taking over a dangerous task that could kill firefighters. (Matthews, K, 2021).This shows that AI improves occupational safety. Most importantly, it does not diminish workers’ rights, since instead of taking over jobs, it plays a supporting role for all professions. Thus, this would not fracture the social contract, since none would be displaced from their livelihoods, thus ensuring a steady income to live on for all. In fact, AI improves occupational safety, a fundamental workplace right, thus improving workers’ rights. 

However, productivity-wise, human error is not truly eliminated since AI only supports rather than does the whole job. Thus, humans still are doing the bulk of the work. Since as shown above, humans make far more errors than AI (Liu, S, 2019, September 6), therefore, setbacks due to errors, though reduced, are still quite possible, thus affecting productivity. Thus, this strategy is imperfect, Still, since implementation is feasible and it somewhat boosts productivity; fulfilling the main intent of this strategy, and does not fracture the social contract; avoiding the major pitfall of AI (Shafik, M, 2021), it is ideal. 

Another possible strategy could be to instead incorporate AI heavily into advanced industries, taking on high-level professions such as surgery or research. According to CNBC, AI is excellent at skills required in white-collar professions such as planning, learning, reasoning, problem-solving and predicting. (Liu, J, 2019, November 27). Since AI has shown to be very advanced in such areas, thus AI is suitable to take on high-level jobs. Also, as Statista previously showed, AI makes less than half as many mistakes as humans (Liu, S, 2019, September 6).Thus, with this strategy, far fewer errors would be made in advanced industries, thus minimising setbacks due to such errors. While this only directly enhances advanced industries, since high-level jobs often influence lower-skilled jobs, for instance, engineers plan what construction workers build (Schreiner, E, 2019, October 22), lower-skilled jobs would also be enhanced, though indirectly. Thus, this lifts labour productivity for all workers. 

However, this is riddled with costs. Socially, the cost is the trade-in of human rights. Since AI would take over advanced industries, many white-collar workers may be displaced from their jobs by AI. Thus, many may become unemployed, losing their source of basic income. This thus fractures the social contract, as employment security, a right promised by most governments (Dasgupta, S, 2001, April), is violated. This could lead to increasing distrust for the government due to no fulfillment of promised rights, possibly leading to the collapse of society and toppling of government, as proposed by philosopher John Locke, who stated that rulers who violated promised terms could be justifiably overthrown (Duignan, B. et al, 2021, July 27). Productivity-wise, AI’s uncreativity makes it an imperfect substitute. According to Medium, AI can only perform what it is programmed to do, and thus is not truly creative (Vandegrift, D, 2019, October 10). Since numerous high-level jobs like architects require creativity (Ideaa Institute of Design, 2019, May 8), AI may not substitute them well, thus possibly decreasing productivity. Feasibility-wise, the time and effort required is supernumerary. According to BBC, it could take 15-80 years for AI to outperform surgeons and mathematics researchers (Gray, R, 2017, June 19). This shows that AI, though capable, is far from a stage that advanced yet. Thus, much time and effort is needed to develop AI further to that level before such implementation. Thus, though this strategy somewhat boosts productivity, it falls into the major pitfall of fracturing the social contract  (Shafik, M, 2021) and is unfeasible, therefore it is not ideal.