In 2016, futurist billionaire founder of SpaceX and current CEO of Tesla Inc., Elon Musk, declared that human jobs would soon be taken over by robots and that governments will have to sustain the unemployed by way of universal basic income (UBI). Martin Ford has already criticized this line of thought in his book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. If UBI is to be implemented, then having small number of people with significant incomes would stunt the growth of a modern economy.
Such predictions are old and have been revisited many times since the turn of the 20th century. Lewis Mumford in his magnum opus The Myth of the Machine noted that not only the Cartesian mechanized world picture would change our environment to be ‘fit only for the machines to live in’, it would also give rise to the ‘megamachine’ – an imagined invisible superstructure that trivializes the cosmic event of Man’s creation, dominates the way he should live, and finally reduces him to a mere cog for its continued existence.
While UBI is a good idea for economically-rich countries, it is not so for poor or corruption-ridden countries. The over-enthusiasm for automation that eliminates middle-class jobs would not solve high poverty levels and anxiety among youths. True enough, the Oxfam Report discussed at the Davos Summit states that the wealth of 3.6 billion people in the world now concentrates in the hands of only 8 individuals.
In December 2016, Eurostat reported that the youth unemployment rates of Italy and Spain, described by the IMF in 1987 as high income nations, stood around 40 percent and 44 percent respectively. Whether it devolves back into class warfare that would disintegrate the EU or any other forms of cooperation closer to home depends on our ability to understand the roads previously treaded in history.
In 2015, renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking viewed that capital owners’ lobby against just and equitable distribution of wealth would accelerate the technological drive towards greater inequality. In a world that confines religion, which is supposed to give Man his life’s meaning and purpose, to a sieged corner of his private life, the danger has now grown to deprive him those of his work as well.
Despite the last 100 years’ great advances of science and technology, the loss of self-meaning and historical identity remains the greatest challenge of the modern man, coalescing in the pain of not knowing where he came from, where he is now, and where he is going. This loss impinges on the ability to attain happiness, which is defined as certainty and conformity with the ultimate truth.
Similarly impacted, Muslim youths today are at loss seeing the poor state of their economies and the lack of success in getting well-paid jobs. In spite of that, automation is not something entirely new in the civilizational history of Islam. ‘Ilm al-hiyal was the discipline of building automatons known as al-alat al-mutaharrikah bi dhatiha (‘devices that move by themselves’), tools to assist with construction work, and structures such as the shaduf and the saqiyah at rivers and cisterns that transport water essential to life and ritual worship. Rather, this loss of self-meaning and historical identity was the gradual result of colonization and the eventual dominance of a way of thinking and living that precipitated in global experience of the loss of work-life balance.
For Muslims, the roads previously treaded which are encapsulated in important works such as Al-Hathth ‘ala al- Tijarah wa-al-Sina’ah wa-al-‘Amal (The Exhortation to Trade, Industry and Work) by al-Khallal (d. 923) and Kitab Adab al-Kasb wa’l-Ma‘ash (The Book of The Proprieties of Earning and Living) by Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111) may serve as guidance for today’s understanding of the correctly measured balance between automation and work.
Islam emphasizes the role of Man as the worldly custodian who is charged with the duty to make it prosper which then becomes his primary occupation. It consecrates work as meaningful venture with noble purpose not separated from his worship of the Creator. God states in the Holy Qur’an: “He Who created Death and Life, that He may try which of you is best in deed” (67:2). Even more so, Muslims affirm every time in their prescribed ritual prayer: “Indeed, my prayer, my devotion, my living, and my dying are for Allah, Lord of the worlds.” (6:162).
As final note, it may be expecting too much for the youth to chart the future of the nation when they too are in the state of perplexity. In the current state of affairs, a better strategy would be at the same time to consult discerning intellectuals and scholars still living among us today who could distill answers from the solutions of our previous civilizations.