Op-Ed: Rethinking humanity as automation rewrites human realities

This is the Cambrian Era of automated economics. This era has barely even begun, and already the world is changing beyond recognition. The old economic model of human life is becoming increasingly irrelevant and even irrational. It simply doesn’t apply anymore, particularly to those under 24.

There is no point in pretending that you go to school, get your qualifications, and get a career and a family automatically. The 20th-century version of human life simply can’t apply.

If the effects of automation on macro-scale life paths are obvious enough, there’s another huge issue. The much deeper and more likely long-term underlying crisis is an apparent total lack of ideas for a viable life model for people.  

There’s plenty of labour market data, but what to do with it?

The daily current plagues of mass layoffs are perhaps better visualized as “extinction events”. These jobs and the lives that went with them aren’t coming back. There’s no template for this situation, and no sign of coherent planning on any level to fit the human realities into the economic realities.

The realities of automation on human life are all too measurable and highly indicative of the future pressures of having a life. Anthropic did a study in March this year that showed that the current overall impact of AI on labour markets is generating levels of exposure to job losses in direct proportion to its capabilities and AI capabilities are increasing.

The Anthropic overview is stark and unambiguous. It’s well worth keeping an eye on Anthropic’s current data sets to see how far and how fast automation is progressing. It’s not really an early warning system for employment, more a sort of weather report.

Underpinning this study is the Anthropic Economic Index, which is a global index of the effects of adoption, integration, and the effects of AI as a big-picture in progress. A quick look at the Anthropic Economic Index landing page shows that automation’s impact is very broadly based. It also shows how wide-ranging AI usage data can be. It includes a vast spread of types of jobs ranging from telemarketers to operations research analysts, fitness and wellness coordinators.

OK, so we’ve got the data. How do we use it? Where do humans get integrated into this world?

The new reality in practice: China grapples with “obsolete degrees” and a displaced generation

China is the leader in automation. The direct effects of automation on rising generations are feeding directly into the economy and feeding back into training and education. It’s a distinct cutoff between the old economy and the new. Many harrowing tales are emerging from the rubble as China’s youth try to navigate the new reality. One of the more obvious dichotomies is that people trained for graduate work are being frozen out with a choice between unemployment and much lower-grade jobs.

China has already banned layoffs due to automation, but the bigger problem of refocusing the workforce has yet to be decided. It’s not an easy problem, and there are no simplistic solutions.  

Current Chinese training solutions seem stopgap. For example, Chinese trainers culled arts and humanities degrees between 2021 and 2025, and “replaced” them with roughly 10% fewer tech degrees.

This defines the human problem. Arts and humanities can never really be “obsolete”. They are core business for human beings and major factors in economics. Tech is a much narrower field in human terms, excluding people outside its direct applications and effectively just following the technologies around.

We’ve been here before, but never like this

Technologies have been reconfiguring human life since the invention of fire. Automation already looks very much like the massive socioeconomic disruption caused by the Industrial Revolution, with the total rewrite of daily life but without the jobs. The ghosts of the Industrial Revolution persist. Many economists refer to deindustrialization as a key factor in economic stagnation, but also use it as an implied default model for economic revitalisation.

The theory is based on a vague and largely false picture of mid-20^th century prosperity. This was the Baby Boom Economics, the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, when it finally delivered the improvements in quality of life worldwide.

Mass production and cheaper availability redesigned human life from the ground up, not theoretical economics. Big increasing populations increased capital and economic demands. The resulting supply chains delivered the jobs and the lifestyle.

The world changed completely in a few decades. New techs created new demands and, in many cases, totally new markets for whole new classes of goods and services. Economics came along for the ride.

Right now is when and where the whole analogy between the Industrial Revolution and the Automation Revolution breaks down completely. Analogies have expiry dates, too.

The global economy is in shock. It’s not “managing automation”. It’s being managed by automation in the most haphazard way possible, at the worst possible time. The cost of living has risen to the point of suffocation. Quality of life has gone a long way backwards just as automation kicks in.

These very old precedents can’t and won’t apply in current economic realities. Deprive whole generations of economic opportunities, and your economy fails at all levels.

The automated economy must deliver accessible aspirations and practical fixes for the vast range of chronic shortfalls of the dying economy. Automation is here, like it or not. It can deliver unprecedented value, but not without human values.