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Karen Bonadio:
Good day everyone. I am Karen Bonadio, director of alumni relations, and I'm delighted to welcome you to our last Alumni Talk Policy Zoom webinar of the semester on AI, employment and the opportunity gap. The Alumni Talk Policy series features ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø alumni and panel discussions about pressing public issues. While we cannot meet in person, technology allows us to convene virtually, and we appreciate your patience as we navigate this event remotely. This webinar is being recorded and closed captioning is available and can be turned on at the bottom of your screen. Today, I'm happy to introduce Chris Riback, MPP 1992, founder of Good Guys Media Ventures, who will moderate this panel discussion. Chris, I'll now turn it over to you to kick off today's important and timely discussion.
Chris Riback:
Thank you, Karen. And thank you everyone for joining, and our extraordinary panelists whom I will introduce in a moment. So Karen and panelists, as you all know, among the most urgent global challenges today is the series of seemingly unreconcilable gaps in wealth, opportunity and equity. These gaps are fueled by a myriad overlapping vicious circles, few more challenging than those around skills and employment.
Chris Riback:
The UN Future of Jobs 2020 report highlighted the double whammy on the one hand, automation destroy jobs, "By 2025, automation and a new division of labor between humans and machines will disrupt 85 million jobs globally in medium and large businesses." On the other hand, automation simultaneously accelerates new jobs. The UN estimates 97 million new emerging roles, including in the fourth industrial revolution technology industries, like our topic today, artificial intelligence.
Chris Riback:
However, for workers to keep their jobs, those jobs, the UN reports in the next five years nearly 50% will need re-skilling for their core skills, which is why we are having a discussion today on AI, business and policy, which seeks to address several of the central public and private sector questions around AI and the future of employment. And you will very soon understand why we have these three guests with us today.
Chris Riback:
Simon Mueller, an MC/MPA 2015, is co-founder and vice president of The Future Society. Shireen Santosham is an MPP 2009, and she is head of strategic initiatives at Plenty. Previously, she was Chief Innovation Officer for the mayor of San Jose. And Anna Stansbury, an MPP 2015, an economics PhD from just this year, congratulations, joins MIT Sloan this fall as an assistant professor in Work and Organization Studies. If she's going to MIT Sloan, then I guess we're going to have to work hard to win her back.
Chris Riback:
Simon, Shireen, Anna, thank you for joining. If you could maybe say a couple more words about each of you, we will do it in alphabetical order, by last name, which means Simon, you are first. And Simon, please feel free to give a quick public service announcement, since we are in the public service business, for The Harvard Kennedy School Emerging Technology Alumni Association, which can be found at HarvardTechAlumni.org. Simon, please tell us about you.
Simon Mueller:
Thank you very much, Chris, and thank you for having me on this panel. I'm indeed the co-founder of The Future Society, which is an organization, a student's organization that we founded 2014 at the Kennedy School, and we are now incorporated both in the US and in Europe in Estonia. Our mission is the governance of emerging technologies, specifically AI, and we work with a variety of organizations from the OECD to the World Bank to the GIZ to Microsoft, The World Government Summit, etc.
Simon Mueller:
With a couple of highlights, we have organized The Global Roundtable on The Governance on AI in Dubai as part of The World Government Summit, The AI Athens Roundtable on AI and The Rule of Law, and then for example, The AI National Strategy for the country of Rwanda last year. The Harvard K School Emerging Technologies Alumni Association is in fact a SIG, special interest group, and we welcome anyone to sign up for events. If you are interested in the questions of impact and governance of emerging technologies such as AI, but not limited to it, please do join us, HarvardTechAlumni.org is the address, and I'll also send that in the chat. Oh, thank you, Rachel.
Chris Riback:
Thank you, Simon. Shireen, could you tell us a little bit more about you?
Shireen Santosham:
Hi, everyone, thank you for having me on the talk today. I would be remiss if I didn't say that I was actually a MPA/ID '09 and I joined you at the business school. And so, I currently work at Plenty, which is a high tech, indoor farm, we use advanced robotics AI to disrupt, essentially the food system, and so our firms can go anywhere, in the middle of a city. We condense hundreds of acres of farmland into the size of a big box retail store using a fraction of the water, and so we're sort of building these farms at scale. We currently have one in San Francisco, and are building the largest vertical farm in the world in Compton this year. And so, it's a really exciting space, and really combines a lot of the topics that we're going to be discussing today.
Shireen Santosham:
Prior to this, I was working as the Chief Innovation Officer for the mayor of San Jose, which is the other big city outside of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, and so home to many of the major tech companies, including Zoom's headquarters is in San Jose. And so, worked on tech policy at the local level, but also with the largest companies in the valley, as well as interacting with the federal leaders, mostly because they of course come to the valley to understand how this technology works. And so, really excited to join this panel, and I'll turn it over to Anna.
Anna Stansbury:
Thanks. Thanks everyone for having me here, I'm very, very excited to be here and have this conversation. I'm a labor economist just as Chris noted, just finished my economics PhD at Harvard this year and starting at MIT as Professor in the fall. And my work focuses on how we can structure labor markets in industrialized economies like the US to provide good jobs and shared prosperity as much as possible.
Anna Stansbury:
And so I think a lot about the questions of how we should respond to emerging technologies in the future of work, and I think a lot about questions around power and institutions in labor markets. Who has the power to set wages? Who has the power to determine working conditions, and how government organizations like unions and business can respond to develop working conditions and good jobs and reduce income inequality?
Chris Riback:
Thank you. Thanks Anna, thank you all and let's dig right in. I'd like go right into that intersection and tension between business and public policy. It's where all of us have studied and worked, and where so many of the people on this Zoom right now work and think about. Given that ongoing and widening disruption and the role that AI will play in reducing existing tasks, creating new jobs, and requiring ever improving human skills to keep pace, what should be government and businesses roles to secure the best of both worlds? How should we think about that tension? Anna, why don't we start with you? How do you think about that tension from where you sit?
Anna Stansbury:
Yeah, so I think a useful kind of starting point here is actually just to start with a little parable of the Luddites, because I think this is where our modern narrative often gets a bit lost. So the Luddites are famous today for smashing machines in protest against new technology, and their name has become synonymous with the desire to slow technological progress. But it's less known that actually the Luddites were largely protesting against the destruction of their livelihoods by the technology and not the technology itself.
Anna Stansbury:
The Luddites were skilled textile workers in England at the beginning of the 19th century, owners of workshops whose workshops had closed, because factories using new weaving machines could produce cloth more cheaply. Their training, many years of training had been rendered completely obsolete, their livelihoods had been lost, and in an era of high unemployment, to add insult to injury, many of them couldn't even find new jobs for low wages in the factories that were often employing children and very poorly trained workers to weave cloth.
Anna Stansbury:
And it was only after many years of repeated petitions to Parliament for minimum wages, for protections of apprenticeships and skilled workers that the Luddites resorted to smashing machines. In return, the government made machines smashing a capital offense, sent the troops onto the protesters and executed many of the protesters for this crime.
Anna Stansbury:
I think this is important to think about, because when we think about technology today, there's often a narrative of slowing the pace of technology in the workplace, but obviously, our discussion today is instead about figuring out who it impacts and how. The parable of the Luddites is important, because it illustrates just how disruptive new technologies can be in the transitional sense, but it also illustrates how important it is that the power structures we have in society respond to allow the people who are impacted to have a say in how those technologies are implemented.
Anna Stansbury:
And I think it's easy to take a 30,000 foot view often in policy and say, "What do we think the ideal world would look like?" What we need to remember is, what do the people who are directly impacted want the world to look like? How do they want the technology to come into the workplace and how can we structure systems such that they have a say, a democratic say in the implementation of that technology?
Anna Stansbury:
I'll just say one more thing, I don't want to take up too much time, but I think another interesting distinction is to think about transitional dynamics versus equilibrium dynamics. So the transitional dynamics are, when we have a new technology that comes in, whether it's a loom in the late 19th century, or a self driving car, what happens to the workers whose jobs are directly destroyed, and whose livelihoods are directly destroyed?
Anna Stansbury:
Whose responsibility should it be to ensure that those workers retain a good living standard and can do a different job with dignity and with good pay for themselves and their families? Government, business, society. But the other is, once that transition has happened and once that shakeout has happened, what is the equilibrium labor market outcome that we will reach? Will the new jobs that have been created actually be better than the old jobs that have been destroyed? And in the Industrial Revolution, for the first couple of decades that wasn't the case. And one might also think that that's not going to be the case today.
Anna Stansbury:
Is it worse to be a Lyft driver than it was to be a taxi driver? Arguably, yes. Is it worse to be a minimum wage home health aide than it was to be a middle income manufacturing worker? Almost certainly based on the pay and working conditions that we have socially determined for those jobs. And so I think we need to bear in mind both of those different factors.
Chris Riback:
Shireen, obviously Anna was referring to me and not you with the Luddite comments, but the whole rest of what she had to say about the balance between the democratization of work, the opportunities, the sense of labor, having some say in how technology affects their output, their labor, their opportunities, these are areas that you have thought about, I would think, and are working in now. So in thinking about what you do at Plenty, in thinking about the jobs that are getting created in that environment, but also keeping in mind the work that you did with the City of San Jose, is it possible to extend the economic opportunity that AI promises without also expanding the opportunity gap that it threatens?
Shireen Santosham:
I think the answer to that is of course nuanced, you'll see... At the end of the day, I think Anna is absolutely right, that jobs are dignity, jobs are... Livelihoods can't be ignored, and sometimes when you talk about these very abstract concepts, whether it's AI or climate change and you ignore the impact on jobs, you're really not going to be successful in an outcome from a public policy point of view.
Shireen Santosham:
In terms of we'll take Plenty as an example our vertical farming. What is happening globally is we're running out of farmland. I mean literally, without chopping down the Amazon, or really going after some of our sort of sacred natural resources, we won't have enough farmland to feed our population, the world's going to need three times more fresh fruits and vegetables than we have today to feed everyone a nutritious diet. And at the same time you see, in farming, really certain jobs, for example picking strawberries are really backbreaking and labor intensive, and people don't want to do it, regardless of where that labor is coming from, if it's immigrant labor or local labor.
Shireen Santosham:
And so something like Plenty can actually bring jobs into a city, provide high tech manufacturing jobs and feed a population without necessarily "displacing workers." I think it's a sort of false narrative that you have to put these two types of farming in opposition to each other, when in fact they're quite complimentary.
Shireen Santosham:
And so I think that's a good example of where we can expand the pool. And in our case we're going into Compton which is a community that has a per capita income of about $17,000 a year and so we're providing good high tech jobs. That all being said, as a Chief Innovation Officer in San Jose, we'd often talk about San Jose as the tale of two cities. So you have a really high income tech workforce, or people who say bought their homes 30 years ago and their property values have just gone through the roof, and so are sitting on a lot of wealth.
Shireen Santosham:
And then you have a lot of low income families, like San Jose is over 30% Latinx, living in a two bedroom apartment with eight people with no digital access, right? And so that San Jose had gone from being one of the most socially mobile cities in the country to really starting to lose that because of the impact of the tech bubble. And so there aren't easy answers to it, but certainly is something that I think the local leadership in the valley is very aware of, and the tech world is increasingly waking up to.
Chris Riback:
Yeah, you are kind of at ground zero there in terms of the impact that technology that AI can have on a society in different towns and the urban environment. Simon, as you are listening to Shireen and to Anna, I know as well that something that you think about quite often is an environment where we are managed by bots, where the AI becomes part of not only what transforms labor and the worker level, but also the management layer. Any thoughts, comments to what you've heard so far from Shireen and Anna? And maybe you can talk about the thinking that you do around our all working for bots.
Simon Mueller:
Yes, yes. And let me actually start by saying, I think in your opening remarks, Chris, you mentioned The UN Future of Jobs Report, right? And I think the World Economic Forum also just published one last year. And in the latter report, it was said that there are, I think, 97 million jobs that were created, right, by AI and digital, 85 million jobs lost, right? Do the math, 12 million net improvement, right?
Simon Mueller:
But it's not that easy, right? Let's not fool ourselves. There's this massive kind of dynamic of transition, right? Anna, that you mentioned, which is a massive friction from getting workers where they are to where they need to be, right? It's not just doing the math and saying, "Oh, this all good, we're creating 12 million of net jobs." So I think there's a massive loss of skills, right? I think there's also just a lot of disruption and friction, right?
Simon Mueller:
And I think the other thing that's being said, when I see two tables, right? One table saying, "Here are the top 20 jobs that are being created by AI," right? And top 20 jobs that are being destroyed by AI or by automation." In the ones that are being destroyed, things rank high like factory workers, executive assistants, secretaries, etc. right? On the other table, on the jobs that are being created, it's things like Shireen mentioned, right? Advanced engineers and advanced technology, machine learning engineers, robotic engineers, etc.
Simon Mueller:
But I think the problem here is that those jobs are fundamentally different, there's a fundamental different quality of the job of an engineer, many of which are essentially creating machines that can create machines. So they're working on further automation. Same thing for data engineers, right? Or data scientists. There's this whole notion of we need more data scientists in this world, but I think one thing we're not really taking into account is the fact that... I don't assume that data engineers today or in five years are going to use pivot tables and spreadsheets, right? They will use tools that make it much easier to do data analysis at scale, and so where should all those 97 million jobs come from? So, I'm highly skeptical at that point, and we can talk about the gig economy in a second.
Chris Riback:
But what you were just saying, Simon, and the thought that we will be creating technology jobs that create more technology, as you think about opportunity, as you think about dislocation, as you think about disintermediation, as you think about the social drivers that are creating so many of the tensions in our society today, are you seeing us going towards a point where that opportunity gap is being closed, or are you looking towards a situation where things are getting worse before they're getting better?
Simon Mueller:
I think the latter, frankly. And the reason is that I think it's extremely difficult to upskill. So, A, there's this quantity issue that I've just alluded to, right? Which is, I don't think that there's just a quantity of jobs that are being created to make up for the job losses, I just don't believe those numbers. And B, the upskilling, I think is much more difficult than we imagine. It is not just taking a three months Code Academy or General Assembly Bootcamp.
Simon Mueller:
By the way, these are education systems that I like, because they are really innovative and to the point and very effective, but I just don't think that this can be done at scale, so I think it's a much harder and longer process than we imagine.
Chris Riback:
So in a moment I have a follow up on that for our labor economist, but before we get to Anna, Shireen, when you listen to what Simon is saying, I'm thinking about vertical farms in Compton. What's the training like? So you're talking about creating jobs in Compton, a place that is not terribly well known for farming. What are you needing to do in terms of up