From Law and Political Economy Project: Open Markets Institute Legal Director, Sandeep Vaheesan, interviews Frank Pasquale about his forthcoming book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI.

Sandeep Vaheesan: Your book is powerful, deep, and a pleasure to read. It will be a major contribution to raging debates over democracy, the power of the tech sector, and what constitutes utopia (or dystopia). The book strikes at trans-ideological myths that have driven the discourse and shaped policy for the past few decades. What is the genesis of this work?

Frank Pasquale: Thanks very much for those kind words, Sandeep. I appreciate your focus on myths, because one of the main purposes of a book like this is to vindicate some common sense about the value of labor, in the face of elaborately mathematicised economics that has lost sight of the purpose of economic growth.

My central argument is that AI and robotics most often complement, rather than replace, human labor, and that in many areas, we should maintain this status quo. Our technology policy should ensure that AI increases wages for most workers, rather than supplanting them.

My central argument is that AI and robotics most often complement, rather than replace, human labor, and that in many areas, we should maintain this status quo.

Those goals are not terribly controversial—governments and political parties around the world claim to advance them. What politicians have ever said they want to cut jobs? But they do tend to favor capital over labor, and stock markets love layoffs. Rentiers can invest in politicians just as they do in stocks and bonds. And when they do so, a key concern is short-term profits, rather than longer-term investment in a more sustainable and inclusive economy.

However, this isn’t just a problem of corruption and improper influence. The economics of automation needs an overhaul. The leading figures in the field rarely make normative judgments about what the economy ought to accomplish or provide. They are so caught up in abstractions, they can’t grapple with the climate or COVID or inequality catastrophes in front of their faces.

I recall hearing one economist talking about how persons that make under $24 an hour are very likely to be replaced by robots, and those making above $48 an hour are very unlikely to be automated out of their jobs. The lesson, according to President Obama’s Chair of Economic Advisors, was that education and job training are key. I don’t disagree on that—New Laws of Robotics promotes both universal college education and targeted training opportunities. But I go much further. I don’t presume that all the well-paid jobs are all that socially useful. Rather, I propose ways to channel investment in AI and robotics toward human services that actually meet important needs, and away from a broad class of tech devoted to ranking, rating, sorting, and punishing people. I think that much of that AI—ranging from police robots to credit scores based on social media profiles to affective computing–is vastly overrated and creepy. (To paraphrase Ryan Calo: there are problems both if it fails to work, and if it works too well!)  So New Laws of Robotics enthusiastically embraces the industrial policy that mainstream economics primly sidesteps to maintain a façade of neutrality.

Sandeep Vaheesan: An important theme of your book is that technology is not an autonomous force. Too often, technology is presented as existing apart from society and periodically shaking up, or “disrupting,” supposedly problematic arrangements—think of the earlier narrative on Uber and the traditional cab industry. You do an excellent job discrediting this view and explaining that the direction and the pace of technological change are a product of human decision-making. How do you see technological change happening at present and what would a more democratic model be?

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