For whom the bell tolls: human employees?
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a
piece of the continent. ~ John Donne
I’ve been fascinated with
robots and technological change for over five decades. My high school drama
club produced Karel Capek‘s play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), that creatively
introduced the word “robot” into the English language and forever after
augmented science fiction’s realm. [Spoiler alert: the robots won.] In graduate
school I examined the process and impact of technological advance in several
industries, including energy utilities.
Industrial robots haven’t
been science fiction for decades. They’ve been used in many industries to
increase productivity and reduce labor requirements. Recently, much more
attention has been cast on robots and more generally, automation advances and
artificial-machine intelligence (AI), as “job stealing” forces that may soon reap
havoc with all sorts of workers’ employment prospects. In his “farewell address” last
week President Obama warned about “the relentless pace of automation that makes
a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.” This week’s Davos meeting of the
world’s political/business/techno-elite has identified
technological disruption (i.e., human workers’ jobs becoming obsolete) as one
of the 4 “biggest risks” of 2017.
Such decades-old
technological forces already have seriously jeopardized the president-elect’s
stated (and impracticable) objective of significantly increasing US domestic
manufacturing employment. Turning manufacturing’s automated digital clock way
back into a labor-intensive, analog pocket-watch will be impossible,
despite Micro Donald’s tweets.
We’ve come way beyond mere robocops. Alarmist pro-roboticists like Jerry Kaplan, author
of Humans Need Not Apply, believe that
with continuing advances in AI, virtually every human job will ultimately be
replaced by automatons. In his book Kaplan says robots will choose to “farm us
[humans] or keep us on a preserve, making life there so pleasant and convenient
that there’s little motivation to venture beyond its boundaries.” Sounds like
big fun, doesn’t it? Martin Ford’s book, The
Rise of Robots, offers another dystopian view of future human employment,
as epitomized by the book’s sub-title, “Technology and the Threat of a Jobless
Future.“ The machines are coming for the high-wage, high-skill jobs as well, Ford
says, and not just for manufacturing jobs, burger-flippers,
or hospitality workers.
According to these authors,
signs of the robotic transformation are hiding in plain sight. Over the last 15
years, 50,000 financial workers on Wall Street have lost their jobs as high-frequency
trading programs complete over 100,000 transactions in one-tenth of a second,
while at the same time attempting to mislead their competitors. A McKinsey study states
that 43% of workers’ time in the financial sector could be automated using expected
improvements in AI. Legal firms no longer are interested in paying staff to
sift through hundreds of documents when a computer can absorb a thousand times
as many in just a few seconds. Automated software can now turn facts into functional
journalism. The list goes on…
Martin Ford says “nearly
any white-collar job that involves sitting in front of a computer manipulating
information” is exposed. Enhanced, AI-based capabilities are behind an Oxford
University study’s examination
of over 700 occupations that concluded 47% of US jobs are at risk from
automation. Currently, that’s almost 75 million jobs that could be threatened,
what Ford characterizes as a “jobless future.” Such provocative, ominous
conclusions have increased concerns about future availability and
sustainability of human employment, and may have precipitated one member of
Congress to say (absurdly) he wished “technological change would just slow
down.”
Nevertheless, individuals and
analysts have bifurcated feelings about these disquieting pronouncements.
A recent New York Times readers’ poll
about future technologies indicated that “robot servants” elicited the highest
number of “somewhat excited” responses (32%) and the most “not too excited” plus “not at all excited” responses
(52%).
Is indeed the bell tolling
for human employees? No, not any more than it generally already has, despite
the media hype to the contrary. The idea that tomorrow’s future will be jobless
plays directly into people’s fears of huge displacement by characterizing the
historical trend of employing new machines-technology to advance productivity
as totally job-killing. It hasn’t ever been. This is not a new trend, and it’s
never ultimately created significant, widespread unemployment.
In the US much of this advancement
began in the mid-18th century in agriculture,
when over 90% of American workers were toiling on farms, with the invention and
adoption of machines like the cotton gin, steel plow and reaper. These
innovations generated massive improvements in labor productivity. Building on
this dramatic agricultural productivity advancement, the Industrial Revolution also
appeared in 18th century Great Britain and beyond. For the first time in
human history, mechanization assumed a keystone position in industrial and
agricultural production.
Certain laborers have been
and continue to be adversely affected by adoption of new technologies. There
are now far, far fewer blacksmiths than there were in the late 19th century –
the pre-automotive age of horse-and buggy power. In 1900 there were about 20
million horses in the US. I estimate that in the very late 19th century there
were between 9,000 and 12,000 blacksmiths just in rural America, where 60.4% of
Americans lived. In addition, there were sizeable numbers of blacksmiths in fast-growing
cities. In 1900 New York City had around 100,000 horses that provided virtually
all types of transportation for humans and commercial establishments. In the
Big Apple alone there were more than 900 businesses that
served this equine population – firms with blacksmiths, wheelwrights and
farriers. At the turn of the 20th century there were probably 3.5 million
horses in American cities. Then things changed, big time.
By the 1920s, after the
horseless carriage (aka, automobile) had utterly reined in horses’ general
transportation duties, blacksmiths and their brethren were no longer as much
needed. Many of them eventually probably found jobs at Ford, General Motors,
Studebaker, or other car manufacturers.
According to Maynard Studios
there are now only 500
professional blacksmiths in the US. Should we shed a tear for the thousands of
long-displaced blacksmiths? No.
Robotophiles’ (or is it
robotophobes?) visions of a jobless future remind me of prognosticators who in
the early days of personal computers confidently predicted that we’d soon be living
in the age of the “paperless office.” So, is your place of work now paperless? Nope;
paper is still plainly present in our offices and homes. The paper industry
produced revenues of
$132 billion last year.
The paperless-future folks
forgot both about people’s needs for tangible documentation, and that technological,
structural changes take a long time to become prominent. Likewise, the menacing
prophecies of writers like Martin Ford and Jerry Kaplan that millions of human workers
will soon be displaced by robots are misguided.
Scott Andes at the Brookings
Institution has found that
there need not be any correlation
between adoption of robots and manufacturing job losses. Countries like Germany,
that utilize more manufacturing robots than we do, have lost fewer
manufacturing jobs. Automation technology creates jobs, doesn’t just supplant them.
Contrary to popular belief, the use of ATMs in the 1990s resulted in an increase in the number of bank tellers
because the cost of opening up new branches was reduced because of the ATMs.
Nevertheless, as automation
technology advances it will continue to especially imperil workers whose time
is mostly spent on routine, repeatable tasks. As has been true during the past
several decades, humans with more computer skills will continue to replace
human workers with inadequate or no computer skills, in the way that graphic
designers and word processors replaced typists. This substitution is never
immediate, despite Ford’s claims; it can require significant investment and
planning. In fact, in his final chapter Ford succumbs to reality by stating
anticlimactically that “there is no question that the economy will remain heavily
dependent on human labor for the foreseeable future.” Yet however beneficial
for the overall economy digital advances can be by improving labor
productivity, those at the bottom of the labor distribution without sufficient
digital or computational skills are the most vulnerable and will be most hurt.
This is why robotophiles should be clamoring for improved, focused education
techniques and programs that will train digitally-displaced workers no matter
how young or old they are, rather than preaching for universal basic
income.
Will robots soon become the
specter of the end of human employment? No, the much-feared jobless future of
the day after tomorrow is pure hype. But continued robotization (aka, advanced,
digital mechanization) of commercial practices will certainly cost jobs, as it has
since the late 18th century, and create them. And yes it’s one of numerous concerns
facing labor; but those shouting about humans losing all prospects of
employment are getting ahead of themselves and reality.
With our in-coming president centered
solely on individual companies’ employment practices (see Carrier Corp’s 800 jobs)
rather than a needed, broader, macro labor strategy, every job lost in Monticello
(Iowa), Grand Rapids (Michigan) or other towns is his only (slender and
momentary) measure of his tweet-based policy’s effectiveness. That’s why he’s
my woeful Micro Man. If,
as expected, he doesn’t extensively increase manufacturing employment, he’ll no
doubt blame innocent Democrats. The fate of our laborers and the economy will
depend on what happens as Micro-Man’s myopia meets a myriad of macroeconomic
challenges, including those surrounding technological displacement.
A January Postscript. As you can imagine, it’s not just blacksmiths who
have been technologically displaced. Nope, Botts Dots
are now headed for history’s dust-bin. The Dots have apparently reached the end
of their road because of new technology – driverless cars.
According to the Sacramento Bee, “After more than a half
century of service, the safety device created by Elbert Botts in a Sacramento
lab and once described by a state official as a loyal old dog, is expected to
be relieved of duty sometime this year. The classic white ceramic dot, a
notable innovation in its day, appears to be a bad fit as a lane marker in the
emerging new world of driverless cars that rely on cameras, radar and computers
to ‘read’ and understand lane lines.” Botts Dots have been done in by
driverless cars; who would have guessed. It’s especially startling since you only
need several people's hands to count the number of validated, non-experimental, fully-driverless cars
and trucks now cruising on California fabled freeways. 