IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 67

Table 1. Effects on the U.S. Labor Market from one
added industrial robot per thousand workers [20].
for some new jobs faster than people will, and Danaher
[25] implicates the winner-takes-all dynamics of
our digitized and globalized economy. The papers
generally then move on to ethical analysis and advocacy
for policies to deal with either the economic
impacts or workers' loss of purpose and agency.
Papers focused on economic policy address the
manual, blue-collar, assembly, and related occupations, "
are summarized in Table 1.
There are numerous factors behind these vicissitudes,
but studies such as those cited above have
prompted some erstwhile adherents of the Keynesian
view to advocate a reassessment and resulted in
numerous articles in popular media. For example, in
his The New York Times column, economist Krugman
[21] reversed his formerly-stated position and wrote
that robot adoption is a net negative for workers.
Robot usage is expected to continually increase,
so the concerns are pressing. Forty-three percent
of businesses surveyed by the World Economic
Forum said " that they are set to reduce their workforce
due to technology integration, " and while the
report notes that job formation is still outpacing job
elimination and predicts that robots will create 97
million in the next five years while displacing 85 million,
" in contrast to previous years, job creation is
slowing while job destruction accelerates " [22]. It
also states that the rate of " technological incursion
into the world of work " had increased ever since the
previous report in 2018, and over half of the respondents
said they are ready to accelerate their job automation
pace. Many occasions will exist, therefore,
when engineers and computer scientists working in
robotics and automation will face ethical questions
about the research, development, and implementation
of this technology. To see what help can be
found in the literature, the field of engineering ethics
is surveyed in the next section.
Survey
Existing engineering ethics papers tackling the
problem of technological unemployment often start
with logical arguments that technological unemployment
is going to happen. For example, McAfee
and Brynjolfsson [23] claim that the present wave
of automation is different from others because
machine learning means humans no longer need to
be able to teach machines how to do a task for it to
be automated, Kim and Scheller-Wolf [24] posit that
machine learning means robots will be able to reskill
March 2023
need that McAfee and Brynjolfsson describe for
" new policies to protect the vulnerable while reaping
the gains of the new age " [23]. In this vein, Parr
[26] points out that the threat of technological unemployment
is greater for low-wage workers because
they are less employable and probably have less savings
and prescribes an " automation tax " to increase
employment opportunities by, for example, training
workers with desirable skills, subsidizing new hires,
or even providing a jobs guarantee. Walker [27] envisions
long-term job shortage necessitating a basic
income guarantee (also known as universal basic
income) and proposes that it is funded through a
" value-added tax, " or VAT. Marchant et al. [28] take
a wider view and describe a variety of potential policies.
Though the significance of such prescriptions
is great, papers in this category deal with neither the
challenges of finding personal meaning in a world
without work nor whether it is ethical for roboticists
to develop job-replacing technology in the absence
of the prescribed economic policies. The latter is
treated in the upcoming sections, while the former
is the subject of existing works on job obsolescence
and meaning, or axiology.
Papers of this type advance the premise that technological
unemployment could be problematic even
with policies in place to meet all workers' material
needs. Losing one's sense of purpose through unemployment
is addressed by Kim and Scheller-Wolf
[24], who hold up a revamped stakeholder theory
as the appropriate model of " corporate purpose and
governance, " arguing that business managers have
a responsibility to: 1) determine which tasks should
be automated and 2) provide a sense of purpose to
displaced workers by enabling civic participation in
corporations' decision making; and by Danaher [25],
[29], who identifies the decisions about which robotic
technologies are pursued as the key to this fight. He
elsewhere identifies loss of moral agency as a potential
concern and urges that technology not be developed
that would co-opt this aspect of humankind [30].
Some work on technological unemployment also
exists in the relatively new field of robot ethics, a
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