Imagine walking into a job interview and finding that the person sizing you up is not a person at all, but an artificial intelligence system. Or picture a taxi driver in Beijing or Shanghai who wakes each morning fearing for his livelihood because, by media accounts, the authorities have licensed several companies to run self-driving cabs — one worry now shared by tens of thousands of drivers.
In South Korea, some shops and cafes are reportedly staffed by robots. Ukraine has sent armed ground robots to the front against Russian forces. And the Financial Times recently reported that US technology firms have shed close to 140,000 jobs since the start of the year.
These are not scenes from a science fiction movie. They are happening now, and at a pace fast enough to leave many people deeply uneasy. Some call them, half-joking, "signs of the end times"; they are better understood as the markers of a new historical phase. Humanity is being propelled forward at a speed that unsettles many and saddens others, who fear being pushed aside and stripped of their livelihoods.
At the heart of it is a rapid transfer of both earning power and control from human hands to algorithms. And this shift has a second, more dangerous face: most of the global technology giants driving the revolution are clustered in a handful of powerful states, chiefly the United States and China.
These companies are unlikely to stay penned for long inside their offices and laboratories, absorbed in their projects and their profits. As they grow more conscious of their own power, they will grow hungrier to extend their political and economic reach across the world to guard their interests — and, through that reach, to claim a hand in writing the rules of whatever international order comes next, on terms that serve them.
To some observers, though, none of this threatens the existence of the state or signals the end of its role. States still hold powers that are theirs by nature: to legislate, to tax, to restrict exports. One of the clearest recent instances is Washington's curb on exporting certain sensitive technologies to China. It confirms that, for all the talk of the corporations' rise, the state can still assert its authority the moment it judges its national security at stake.
What is taking shape, then, is not the swapping of one authority for another. It is better described as a new and intricate balance of power between the state and the widening grip of the technology companies across nearly every domain of life.
The crisis works on two linked levels. The first is individual: the risk that a person may be sidelined and lose his livelihood overnight. The second is international: a fierce contest among the major powers to command technology in the pursuit of influence and dominance. The two are tightly bound, because the well-being of stable societies rests directly on the availability of work and on holding unemployment down, with all the social dangers a rise would bring.
Yet the picture is not wholly bleak. The same revolution may also answer a demographic bind facing much of Europe and Asia: aging populations, falling birth rates, and the political barriers hastily raised to keep immigration from filling the resulting labor gap. Seen from that angle, technology is not a pure threat. It may be exactly what these societies need to keep their economies running.
The real question is not whether the transformation can be stopped. Stopping it is all but impossible and would do harm besides. The real question is how to manage the transition smoothly, at the least possible cost. Three paths, to my mind, deserve pride of place in the attention and priorities of decision-makers.
The first, and most important, is to redefine what work means, through serious investment in retraining the workers whose jobs are most exposed.
The second — economists' emphasis — is for states to use their powers of legislation and taxation not to block technological progress, but to keep its rewards from pooling in the hands of a few companies, so that some of the gain flows back to the societies bearing the cost of the change.
The third is to treat digital technology as a partner in development and human progress, and to recognize what it can do to ease a real crisis: the aging of the workforce in country after country.
Between the individual's fear for his livelihood — legitimate, and a matter for real concern — the rivalry of states chasing influence through technological supremacy, and aging societies' hunger for workers, the equation of the new technological era is coming into focus. Above all, in the view of those who study it, whoever manages that equation with awareness and balance will stand the best chance of shaping the features of the next international order.
