14 November 2017
TUAC Briefing on the OECD Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Paris, 26-27 October 2017
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is steadily growing as a policy issue. This requires building an understanding of the benefits (medical diagnostics, environmental efficiency) and the challenges that it might bring. Amidst a lot of hype, there should be caution about the state of technological development and implementation. The OECD held a high-level conference on AI in Paris on 26-27 October. With the main business leaders and experts in attendance, it is clear that it is not only the trade unions which are concerned about its employment and societal effects.
We are still far away from general artificial intelligence (i.e. applications that can perform tasks at a comparable or higher level of cognitive capacities and judgement as humans). No AI system has flexible cognition or the capacity to make inferences. Instead, we are dealing with “narrow AI”: online translation services or predictive data analytics (e.g. financial services). Yet, there is no doubt that big data (and cross-border data flows) and computational power reinforce each other, and machine learning thrives on sophisticated algorithms.
It will be important to keep track of new milestones in AI research and applications, as well as to look at the immediate impact of “narrow” AI on all economic sectors along business value chains. Keeping a human-centred approach over its introduction, design and use is pivotal. Trade unions need to assume a central role in industrial relations to prevent high societal costs including security risks, job displacements and discriminative algorithms. The mainstreaming of AI should not deepen inequalities in income and opportunities as any productivity gains from AI, and digitalisation at large, should be shared fairly.
Trade unions made clear that there will be no public acceptance for radical widespread disruption led by a few. Instead policy makers, the social partners, the technical and the academic communities should strive for a digital diffusion with a strong social dimension. To be able to anticipate and devise strategies, it is important to look at the drivers, key players, elements for scenario building and policy needs:
To anticipate the impact of AI and understand its network effects, the following aspects need to be considered across policy silos:
Public policy needs to look into the economic, social including labour market, ethical and legal aspects of AI as several risks arise and regulatory frameworks are not keeping up and:
As set out in the TUAC recommendations on Digitalisation and the Digital Economy (February 2017), all technological transformations including the diffusion of AI should be accompanied by “just transition” principles for workers. Such policy framework should address the uncertainties regarding job impacts, risks of job losses, of undemocratic decision-making processes and of lowering rights at work, as well as of regional or local economic downturn, among others. While the framework was initially developed by trade unions in the context of climate change and endorsed in the COP21 agreement, its principles are valid to address the digitalisation of economies including:
Moving ahead, future OECD work on AI should focus on ethical and operational standards for the design, diffusion and application including governance frameworks and regulatory parameters. The OECD should also foster coherence by bringing other policy areas into the discussion in its Going Digital horizontal project and beyond to ensure that such technological disruptions are shaped by proactive regulatory, economic and social policies. In doing so, it needs to include both social partners and other stakeholders into future deliberations.