IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 65

A Roboticist's Guide to
the Engineering Ethics of
Job Automation
Matthew Marshall
Department of Robotics and Mechatronics
Engineering
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, GA 30144 USA
 There is concern about robots taking people's
jobs. Advances in automation risk bringing material
and psychological harm to workers, so it is important
to study the ethics of this engineering discipline.
Existing work focuses on either policy to ameliorate
workers' income loss or the effects of losing agency.
What is missing is a guide to help automation engineers
and roboticists evaluate their moral responsibilities.
This article addresses that gap by providing
some motivation for these practitioners to consider
the ethics of job obsolescence and tools to evaluate
relevant professional choices.
First, an introduction for the benefit of any uninitiated
automation engineers and roboticists: The field
of ethics deals with moral rightness and wrongness
actions. It is divided into three branches: metaethics,
which plumbs the foundations of morality; normative
ethics, that is, the work of developing rules
guiding proper conduct; and applied ethics, which,
as one would infer, deals with the application of
normative theories to specific issues [1]. This article,
then, is a case study of engineering ethics applied to
job-obsolescing technology.
Technological unemployment
This section presents evidence that modern automation
reduces workers' job opportunities. Concerns
about machinery's impact on employment
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3244568
Date of current version: 7 March 2023.
March 2023
and wages are nothing new, but for the past 250
years, they have been dismissed by conventional
wisdom, which holds that despite eliminating jobs,
the productivity gains engendered by automation
improve living standards for both owners and workers
alike. Writing in 1930, the English economist
John Maynard Keynes urged his compatriots to bear
patiently the downsides of increased " technical efficiency "
and view them as mere growing pains on the
path toward an " age of leisure and abundance " [2].
He introduced the phrase " technological unemployment "
to describe a situation where innovation had
obviated the need for some labor, and society was
still in the process of seeking new uses for that displaced
manpower. In Keynes's vision, this process
would eventually lead to most people focusing on
the " art of life, " that is, how to live " virtuously and
well. " The currently popular view is more modest,
claiming only that " New automated technologies
will . . . generate extra income, initially for the owners
of intellectual and financial capital behind these
new technologies, but eventually feeding into the
wider economy as this income is spent or invested
in other areas. This additional demand will generate
more jobs and increase incomes " [3].
There is evidence supporting this view. For
example, Henry Ford drew on his experience with
automation stoking demand when he wrote, " every
considerable expenditure of money for new and
improved labor-saving machinery has had as its
inevitable corollary an increase in employment in
our shops " [4]. Bob Doyle, former vice president
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65
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023

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