How to Avoid Populism 2.0 and the Robot Revolution

Cutting-edge tools like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, advanced robotics, nanotechnology, and more have potential to improve lives and help solve the world’s biggest problems. But if governments cannot also harness them in ways that strengthen the democratic process, the global trend of populists with zero-sum ideologies being catapulted to office may soon become much worse.

This is because as tech-fuelled disparities gain pace in the coming years, social stratification will deepen, burnishing the appeal of leaders pitching simplistic solutions to complex problems.

True, new technology has historically created novel occupations while rendering others obsolete, leading some to argue that AI and automation may create more jobs than they threaten. But as American academic Erik Brynjolfsson has noted, past trends are not guaranteed to repeat themselves. “Improvements in technology can improve productivity. For most of the 20th century, those productivity increases were associated with job growth and growing wages. But there is no economic law saying that always has to be the case.”

In 2017, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute analyzing 2,000 work responsibilities across 800 different job roles suggested that about half of contemporary work activities, worth almost $15 trillion in wages in the global economy—especially physical tasks in highly structured and predictable settings, or those based on the collection and processing of raw data—could be automated by 2055, possibly even as soon as 2035. And this was before the pandemic fast-tracked several years’ worth of digital adoption in business operations and supply chains.

One vulnerable sector is transportation, where trucking could be hit particularly hard. Self-driving vehicles in the freight industry are already being road tested, with proponents saying autonomous trucks will not only be safer but also reduce shipping costs by 40 percent due to not having to hire a human driver. The vast majority of those millions of human drivers: white males over 48 years old with lower levels of education.

Elsewhere, large AI language models and deepfake software will eventually compete for countless low-skilled jobs involving a wide range of customer support services. Meanwhile, other user-friendly machine-learning models are producing increasingly sophisticated computer-generated art and music and will destroy career opportunities in the creative industries.

The impacts of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution will also upset social relations in other ways that could fuel culture wars and grievance politics, including when and how—not if—robots could be granted some equivalent to human rights.

Left unaddressed, populist movements are likely to swell in size and number, as disaffected populations caught on the wrong side of economic transformations seek retribution against an undefined set of “elites” perceived as clinging unfairly to the top of the socioeconomic ladder. Indeed, many people in the Western world are already increasingly unable to deal with the dissonance between their subjective expectations for their lives and the objective material realities they must contend with. The result has been a surge in online conspiracies and extremism and the embrace of political violence and victimhood as a source of identity and personal meaning.

To push back, public agencies should use creative digital methods to make better use of citizen assemblies to directly advise bureaucrats on a whole host of policy measures to ensure they don’t disproportionately burden the middle and working classes—and, in general, help the average voter feel more empowered to voice their concerns constructively. Other relevant actions for governments to take include strengthening transparency rules alongside shrewd digital services legislation, and devising carrot-and-stick incentives for private firms and engineers developing AI programs to demonstrate application of effective AI governance strategies.

At the international level, American political scientist Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group, has advocated for the assembly of an intergovernmental body similar to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to examine and address the global risks of runaway AI becoming decoupled from serving human interests. This echoes calls for a digital Bretton Woods moment.

The future of democratic politics may hinge on whether policy makers are up to the task.

Kyle Hiebert is an independent analyst and contributor to the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and was formerly based in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, as the deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.