Social Policies are Lagging Way Behind our Changing Lives

Amazing scientific progress sees jobs changing, people living longer… Society needs to adjust its thinking

Sonia Sodha

The Guardian/The Observer

Sunday, 28th December 2014

Old people are living longer – but perhaps the quality of 

life is not as good as it should be. 

Photograph: Michaela Rehle/Reuters

At the heart of Atul Gawande’s last Reith lecture was an image upon which many of us would prefer not to dwell: institutionalised older people living out the ends of their lives in residential homes all over the world, ranging from the luxurious to the Dickensian. Be they for the rich or poor, Gawande argued that too often they are places where physical needs are catered for with little consideration for the fulfilment, flourishing and wellbeing of the people who live within their walls; a consequence of medicine, with its focus on how to stretch lifespans ever further, running far ahead of social policy.

This insight touches on a bigger theme: the capacity of public policy to keep pace with the accelerating rate of scientific progress. For centuries, the human quest for knowledge and enlightenment has delivered transformational new technologies, from the wheel to the steam engine, inventions that have changed the course of human history for the better. In recent history, however, the pattern of progress has evolved: no longer characterised by one-off, disruptive innovations, but the exponential growth of computer power, doubling every two years.

How prepared are we for the profound societal changes that may be unleashed as a result?

The accelerating pace of technological development has already irrevocably affected the nature of work, critical to human flourishing in the way it imbues our lives with identity and meaning. The notion that a society’s members work to produce what it needs is what has made both human psychologies and political economies tick since the dawn of time.

While technology has generated more jobs than it has displaced, it has created winners and losers in recent years. New engineering jobs are little consolation for workers who trained for mid-skill manufacturing jobs, only to see them replaced by machines. In the wake of the financial crisis, we are witnessing a renewed political interest in inequality and the role technology has played in “hollowing out” jobs from the middle of the labour market.

But if we have experienced this degree of change in the last 30 years, what might the next 30 bring? 2014 was the year Google unveiled its prototype for a driverless car and a computer passed the Turing test – convincing a human of its own humanity – for the first time. Medical algorithms have been shown to make more accurate diagnoses than GPs. What other jobs may go the way of the production-line jobs replaced long ago by robotics? Perhaps London cabbies would have been better off mounting their recent protests in front of Google’s HQ rather at the arrival of Uber.

Futurology is a discipline rarely characterised by consensus and this area is no exception. The Pew Center recently canvassed the opinion of 2,000 technology experts, who were divided on whether we will ever reach a tipping point where technology starts to replace more jobs than it creates. But there was consensus that developments in artificial intelligence will have a huge impact on future employment, with growing numbers of jobs reliant on human characteristics artificial intelligence can’t replicate, such as caring and empathy, and creativity and imagination. This will profoundly affect societal structures and identity politics, further shifting economic power towards those able to develop the skills that will complement the machines of the future.

The way we feel these impacts will of course depend on how we respond as a society. In the past, societies have adapted to disruptive innovation through radical social reforms: the establishment of compulsory primary education and friendly societies in response to the demands of the Industrial Revolution; the creation of the National Health Service and the welfare state after the Second World War.

What is striking about today’s public services is not how much has changed in recent decades, but how much has remained constant. Victorian primary schools still provide the model around which schools are organised today; we continue to rely on a system of face-to-face appointments with GPs, who act as gatekeepers to the rest of the healthcare system. Hospitals are still the places where older people who go in with a broken hip too often end up never leaving.

A world dominated by more creative and caring jobs will require us to think differently, both about the education system and about the nature of these future jobs. But far from matching recent technological change with bold social reforms, the response has too often amounted to little more than forcing those who lost manufacturing jobs into the humiliating ritual of weekly jobcentre check-ins with little support to retrain, or relying on migrant workers to care for our parents without asking why there aren’t more Brits coming forwards to do these jobs. Judging by some of today’s political debate, the most likely response of the future may be an anti-tech Ukip calling for the intelligent robots to be sent home.

An ever-present danger of gazing into the future is that it can quickly descend into shrill scaremongering, joining the ranks of dire predictions made by history’s doomsayers of progress and enlightenment, precipitating the downfall of humanity. But when a scientist as eminent as Stephen Hawking chooses to warn of the risks of artificial intelligence, we should take note.

We need a proper debate about what social reforms we might need to respond to today’s exciting scientific advances: what might a contemporary equivalent of the 1870 Education Act or the 1946 NHS Act look like? Do we need to develop new transitions for people from education into work, rather than relying so heavily on a system in which half of young people now take expensive university courses they will spend much of their working lives paying off? How might we reconceive of caring jobs and how we recruit and train care workers, to transform older people’s quality of lives and increase job fulfilment in a sector whose expansion is inevitable?

Scientific progress has been a huge force for good, but it brings risks as well as opportunities; dangers as well as freedoms. We rely on politics to mediate some of those impacts through social reform. But contemporary political debate sometimes feels stretched talking about the challenges of the here and now, let alone those of the future. The solutions being proffered do not scratch much deeper than building more care homes or tacking coding on to the national curriculum.

Gawande’s observation that we have ended up with healthcare systems focused on keeping older people alive without helping them to preserve lives infused with meaning points out a symptom of scientific advance outpacing social progress. Unless we are able to crack open the “too difficult” box, we risk paving the way for further symptoms in coming decades: increasing numbers of young people feeling their education has failed to prepare them for adult life and the continuing erosion for some groups of the meaning of work.