One Crisis to Solve Another? The Place of Care in a World of Automated Work

The world of work seems to be facing at least two different crises: The first comes from the fact that automation, mostly the widespread use of advanced AI, might eliminate many more jobs than it will create; this is the crisis of technological mass unemployment (Dobbs et al. 2015; Acemoglu and Restrepo 2019). The second crisis, already unfolding, consists in a shortage of care. Here I suggest that each crisis can solve the other, if people who would have filled the automated jobs in the absence of the first crisis were to enter the caring professions. Not all caregiving should be automated, and both caregivers and those in need of care have weighty interests in some needs being met by human beings under good working conditions. States are justified in passing policies that create numerous quality caregiving jobs, train the labor force for these jobs, and provide financial and other incentives to attract workers. Although both crises are widely discussed, they are rarely discussed together. Yet, it is possible that instead of mutually compounding their harms, each crisis might hold the key to solving the other. I propose that we approach them in conjunction rather than separately, to see how the care crisis can provide not only practical, but also justificatory keys to resolving the unemployment crisis, and the other way around. As I explain in due course, technological unemployment makes it unnecessary to solve the care crisis by enrolling citizens into mandatory care services—as some philosophers suggested—and the care shortage makes it possible to avoid the undesirable alternatives of maintaining jobs that lack productive rationale or condemning many people to involuntary unemployment.1 The next section discusses the two crises in more detail; the subsequent one elaborates on the normative background of the paper, distinguishing between care in general and personal care, exploring their value and relation to justice, and explaining why personal care ought not to be fully automated. Section 4 argues that the automation crisis and the care crisis can provide mutual practical solutions. Section 5 is about the ways in which the existence of each crisis helps justify responses to the other crisis, and the success requirements of these mutual solutions. Section 6 discusses a few normative worries raised by my proposal. Some expect automation to put 47% of the jobs in the United States at high risk for redundancy over the next two decades (Frey and Osborne 2017: 254–280). Not everyone, however, is convinced that AI-centred technological progress will really lead to an unemployment crisis of significant proportions (Autor 2015). There is room for empirical disagreement about this matter, and the interest of this paper depends largely on the existence of such a crisis. Yet, the mere possibility of automation, together with reasons to reform care, discussed below, provide grounds for states to regulate the labor market to redirect the labor force from jobs that can be automated into care work. The existence of a care crisis, that is, of a large gap between care needs and the capacity to meet them, is less controversial (Folbre 2001; Fraser 2017; Dowling 2021). Numerous people lack the hands-on help they require, both practically and emotionally. The care crisis has different faces, which show themselves to different degrees across various societies. In poor countries it often comes in the form of extreme shortages of health care professionals such as doctors and nurses; economically developed countries, too, lack enough health care workers—though the situation is a lot less dire—and they also lack enough caregivers for children, elderly people and non-institutionalized ill and disabled individuals. Part of the care crisis is about caregivers' working conditions: underpaid and socially undervalued (Folbre 2001), rushed, overburdened, micromanaged and deprived of adequate opportunities to provide relational goods such as attention, concern and affection that are necessary to meeting emotional needs and hence integral to some kinds of care (Dowling 2021). This means that both caregivers and care receivers are deprived of the important goods of human connection in the context of care. An important and closely related aspect of the care crisis is sometimes called a “loneliness epidemic.” It besets the developed world (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008) and consists of large numbers of people suffering from social isolation. Some worry that advances in the automation of care work may lead to an excessive decrease in human caregiving (Sharkey and Sharkey 2012; Santoni de Sio and van Wynsberghe 2016) which, most plausibly, would As care care both and 2021). 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