By Karen Sternheimer
When I was in high school, I watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Years later, I didn’t remember much about the movie, other than the computer Hal’s monotone voice when speaking to Dave, the astronaut, who must “kill” Hal to save himself after Hal killed the rest of the crew.
As a twentieth century teen, I thought this was all cool and entertaining. When I rewatched as a twenty-first century middle-aged adult, I was a little freaked out. The 1968 film didn’t exactly capture what life in 2001 would look like, but there are a few similarities in 2025, at least with the growth of artificial intelligence.
As a sociologist who studies moral panics—overblown fears that tend to happen in times of change—I’m not one to fear the future. Artificial intelligence has been with us for decades—at least as long as the internet search engine has been part of our daily lives. It is not new, but its uses are growing. I’m not really afraid that robots will “take over” like Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey tried to do, but they are taking over some types of jobs that provide a decent livelihood for many people.
Have you seen cars that look like the one pictured below in your community? There are about 2,000 Waymo driverless cars on the road in the U.S, many of which seem to be in my neighborhood. These cars serve as potential replacements of rideshare drivers, who in turn have largely displaced taxi drivers and airport shuttle services.
It was a bit unsettling to look at a car next to me without a driver while driving, but it was really concerning when I crossed the street on foot, which I did right before taking this picture. Would the Waymo try and make a right on red? Would it stop in time? But the Waymo behaved well enough, at least this time, and waited as I crossed the street.
I have also encountered small robot carts delivering items, like “Barbara,” pictured below. These devices have been tooling around the sidewalks in my neighborhood. In my brief encounters with them they are very deferential to humans. As I approached, “she” came to a complete stop and waited for me to pass. Then “she” appeared to get stuck on the sidewalk, which was uneven. When I returned an hour later, “she” was still there. I admit I felt bad for “her,” as if it were a sentient being struggling to get her work done in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Projecting human qualities onto nonhumans, or anthropomorphism, enables us to feel more connected to the nonhuman. This is probably why the carts have names and blinking lights that resemble eyes. We might be less resistant to using them if we “feel” for them.
While I’m not someone who is likely to use either service—I don’t usually have items delivered from local businesses, and life-long nightmares about riding in a driverless car rule out Waymo for me, at least for now—many people do use these services.
Rideshare and deliver drivers aren’t happy about this, as a recent protest in Seattle illustrates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, median income for drivers in 2023 was just over $38,000 a year, or less than half of the median household income.
These jobs have their drawbacks, as drivers have complained about reductions in pay, long hours, difficult passengers, and the costs that they have to shoulder (gas, insurance, maintenance). Drivers have worked to unionize and advocate for better pay and benefits. But if human labor becomes obsolete, any gains would be moot.
Artificial Intelligence, like any change, has its positive potential, particularly in assisting physicians. As the Harvard Medical School reported:
AI can automate tasks to free up a clinician’s time to focus more on their patients, “humanizing” care in new ways. With many health care providers feeling overworked today, tools like medical scribe technology can automatically capture visit notes and store them in a patient’s medical record, even flagging key details and insights. This can increase efficiency and free up clinicians to focus more on face-to-face time with their patients. ….All of this can reduce the manual and cognitive burden that many clinicians are feeling. Ultimately, this can help prevent clinician burnout while improving the patient experience….
AI can aid in the diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases. One of the challenges of diagnosing and treating someone with a rare disease has traditionally been that clinicians may not recognize the signs of a condition they have not personally encountered. Finding other cases of rare diseases online can also be challenging. By scanning large data sets to find similar cases, AI can help clinicians not only get to a diagnosis more quickly but also find examples of treatments that have been effective in people with this condition.
This is potentially great news for those who have access to health care. But for jobs that have been or will be automated: assembly line workers, grocery clerks, delivery drivers, rideshare drivers, and maybe even long-haul truck drivers, working-class jobs that many people rely upon might not exist.
Robots might be safer on the roads. They might not mean us any harm, unlike Hal. But the future of work remains uncertain for many people whose jobs have been or will be automated.
Photos courtesy of the author.