Ruadhán Jones
Author Fr Seán McDonagh SSC. Photo: Giovanni Portelli Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs
by Fr Seán McDonagh SSC, with a foreword by Karlin Lillington (Messenger Publications, €19.95/£18.95)
The Russian quasi-mystic and film director Andrei Tarkovsky was reputedly terrified about the implications of robots. He thought The Terminator, though by his own account a mediocre film, pushed “the frontier of cinema as art” for its vision of the future – one in which man and machine must fight for ascendancy.
The apocalyptic visions of The Terminator are unlikely to be realised any time soon – but Fr Seán McDonagh believes that automation does pose a credible threat to the stability of human life and sets out in Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs to show how and why.
Fr McDonagh is a Columban missionary, author and environmentalist theologian of repute. He spent over two decades working in the Philippines and has written numerous books on ecology and theology including To Care for the Earth (1986), The Death of Life, The Horror of Extinction (2004), Climate Change: The Challenge to Us All(2006), and Laudato Si’: An Irish Response (2017).
Green theologian
With To Care for the Earth, Fr McDonagh was one of the first ‘green theologians’ to champion the environmental cause. With Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs, he is setting out with similar intent to raise awareness on the pressing issue of the automation of jobs.
Fr McDonagh argues that rapid technological advancements could eradicate 40-50% of current jobs over the course of the next 20 years. As such, political and religious leaders should act fast to protect the most vulnerable.
Fr McDonagh balances the good with the bad, as best he can. Each chapter opens with an overview of the positive advancements made. For example, new mining technology will hopefully negate the need for men and women – even children – to undertake often dangerous and back-breaking work. The flipside is it will also eradicate jobs for those who often need them badly.
The book ranges widely, touching on issues from artificial intelligence and the need for ethical guidelines, to surveillance capitalism and the potential dangers of the unregulated commodification of personal data. Each topic receives its own chapter – there are 11 in all – but the book is quite short. It’s a summary of knowledge in the public domain rather than an in-depth study, as is indicated by the references, which are typically newspapers or magazines rather than studies.
This has its pros and cons. As someone with a fledgling interest in the subject, it provided a useful introduction. It is astonishing to consider the breadth of the issue – it is not limited to truckers and retailers, but also to high-end economic work, from factories in Bangladesh to stockbrokers in New York.
Changes
The scale of the changes and the speed at which they take place makes it hard to legislate or to comprehend the extent to which the shape of society may be affected. This is where the disadvantage comes in.
By condensing so much information into 180 pages, Fr McDonagh cannot deep-dive into the complex projections and speculations inherent in predicting the future of any field.
While he does mention historical examples of industrial revolutions, the book would have benefitted from detailed analysis of how these revolutions preceded and how our own potential revolution compares. Equally, that much of the information is already publicly available means those who are sceptical or on the fence are unlikely to be convinced, though it may spark further research on their own.
I had been warned beforehand that Fr McDonagh’s prose can be dense and as such that it may be a slow read. That wasn’t the case, the prose being pithy, but I came away wishing it had been more complex. While an engaging introduction to the subject, it arguably needed a longer, more detailed treatment.