Planning for Our Own Obsolescence
This article is based on a longer version published in The Tracinski Letter.
In previous columns, I have sketched out some of the big new technological innovations that are likely to reshape the economy and bring us all into a science-fiction future. I discussed the "Third Industrial Revolution" which is merging the Internet with manufacturing, the rise of robotics, and the potential integration of this new technology with the human body and brain.
For the most part, the controversy is not whether this new technology is coming, but what its effect will be on the economy. Perhaps it's because we've been conditioned by three decades of science-fiction hysteria, but the highest degree of hand-wringing seems to be reserved for the rise of the robots.
Most of the arguments about the supposedly ominous impact of robotics--or at least most of the sophisticated ones--trace back to MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and their 2011 book Race Against the Machine. A recent long profile in MIT Technology Review summarizes their argument for how the new technology is taking away all of our jobs.
"Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology--from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services--are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine....
"'It's the great paradox of our era,' he says. 'Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren't keeping up.'"
They date this "great decoupling" between productivity growth and wage and job growth to about 2000. This was also a period in which government began its latest big splurge of spending and regulation. So you can see a strong ulterior motive to argue, as the Washington Post's Harold Myerson does, that "the private sector no longer creates jobs and prosperity like it used to, completely apart from whatever effects governmental policy may have on job creation." Uh-huh. It's a great way to set up robots to take the blame for the economic consequences of the regulatory and welfare state.
But over the two centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the economic consequences of technological progress have been very well established. Rather than making everyone unemployed, technological innovation creates a vastly expanded range of opportunities for jobs with much higher productivity.
But the bar for what is a "skilled" job has been rising. The flip side of work that has higher productivity in terms of output is that it generally requires more productivity on the part of the worker--not necessarily working longer or harder, but contributing more thought, experience, or knowledge. Any work that doesn't require such a higher level of skill is subject to being automated.
This is already affecting a lot of the jobs we were told to move into as an alternative to the old manufacturing jobs. The "service" industry is the next to go. And then of course there are robot surgeons. All of this is what led me to warn that "We Are all Expendable Now," because jobs that we used to think could never, ever be automated are increasingly being done by robots or computers.
So does that mean that new technologies really will eliminate jobs? Of course they will. All economic progress eliminates jobs. That is its purpose. You might even say this is its definition: economic progress is the elimination of jobs.
A proper definition of economic progress begins with the recognition that human labor is the single most precious and limited resource, and the goal of human life is to conserve this resource, doing more with less of it. So the whole purpose of economic progress is to reduce the number of tasks that have to be performed by human labor.
So of course we are constantly eliminating old jobs from the economy. A society in which everyone does exactly the same work in exactly the same proportions as they did 100 years ago, or 25 years ago, or even ten years ago, would be a society paralyzed by stagnation--and that would truly be an economy without opportunities.
Which is exactly the opposite of the story the neo-Luddites are telling us.
Andrew McAfee asks, "when all these science-fiction technologies are deployed, what will we need all the people for?" It's like going back to 1813 and seeing one of the old Luddites staring uncomprehendingly at a power loom and asking: once these things come into the factories, what are we going to weave by hand? Well, you're not going to weave anything by hand. But there are going to be all sorts of new jobs you know nothing about and whose existence you can't even imagine yet.
The best answer to this sort of question was given by a pro-technology writer--there are a few of us out here--who explains:
"One argument says that this time is different because soon robots will be able to do everything a human does. But it's misguided to assume we can forecast what humans 'will do.' What that statement really means is, 'In the future, robots will do everything humans do today.' But what exactly it is that humans will do in the future is anyone's guess-and few, if any, have ever successfully predicted it.
"Before the 20th century, most folks in the West farmed. Now, thanks to massive productivity gains in agriculture, virtually none do. To a 19th century farmer that would imply nothing less than the collapse of the economy. Why? Because the thing most people did back then was farm. Our farmer might understandably wonder, 'What will we do when machines perform our jobs for us? How will we make money? How will we survive?'"
The answer is that old jobs disappear, and people adapt by doing different jobs. The agriculture analogy is instructive. Not only do few people work in agriculture today, but relatively few even work in businesses that support agriculture. It's not that we've all moved from working on the farm to building tractors for John Deere. Instead, most of the new jobs provide goods and services that didn't exist at all until relatively recently when someone invented them.
Instead of complaining about the disappearance of the jobs people do today, we should be considering all of the opportunities that are opening up for the jobs we will do in the future.
In anti-capitalist ideology, one of the omnipotent powers attributed to Big Business is "planned obsolescence," in which businesses prosper by continually selling us new and improved versions of their product. This is not, of course, any great conspiracy; it is the very nature of technological progress. But if corporations can make money from products that keep becoming obsolete, to be replaced by something new and better--why can't we do the same thing with ourselves? If our existing jobs are going to become obsolete--as they should, in a society shaped by economic progress--then shouldn't we be planning for our own obsolescence?
If we are all going to end up serving our new robot masters, then the first, most obvious response is to become one of the robot masters. That can mean becoming an engineer or learning how to program the software that runs the new robot economy. But it can also mean a whole constellation of jobs designing, marketing, servicing, and managing robots--and finding new uses for them.
It's important to remember that we are still very early in the rise of robotics. One of the new robotics entrepreneurs, Rodney Brooks, describes how he got the inspiration for his latest venture when he was setting up a production line in China, and "I saw people building a million robots a year and doing it by hand."
Building robots by hand. Now there is an image that sums up where we are. That means that there are still many thousands of uses for computers, the Internet, and robotics that are still left to be discovered, which is another way of saying that there are thousands of new business opportunities.
And then there is the fact that the very thing everyone is complaining about, the loss of jobs, is a huge economic benefit when looked at from the other side. The neo-Luddites present every technological innovation in terms of the loss it will create for one person in one particular area--the worker whose specific jobs is automated out of existence--while glossing over the benefits this creates for everyone else: the jobs created in other fields, the extra work that will be done by a more productive machine, and the money saved by the consumers of the goods and services provided by machines. For every particular job made obsolete by robots, there is a cascade of economic benefits that outweighs that loss (which, in turn, will create new opportunities for the displaced worker).
If you want to look only at the negative, you can point out that because of new technology, start-up companies are hiring fewer people than they did before. But then you could also look at the wider effect and realize that this will make it possible for entrepreneurs to create more start-ups which will become more profitable sooner because they have to cover fewer costs. Another observer notes an increase in the "million dollar one-person business." This is just another way of describing the same phenomenon--the lower number of employees for start-ups--but in a way that highlights its benefits.
Rather than heralding the end of employment, the rise of computers and robotics will herald the next great age of entrepreneurship, where it will become even easier to start a business out of a spare bedroom--and to keep running it there--with less capital than would have been required in a previous generation.
You may have noticed that in discussing the economic impact of the new technology, I made a subtle shift from talking about "jobs" to talking about "economic opportunities." Increasingly, opportunity won't come in the form of a job listing in the newspaper. (Do those even exist any more?) It will come in the form of an entrepreneurial opportunity, a task that needs to be done or a business that can fill a gap.
This is where we get to the heart of the neo-Luddite complaints: what I call Allentown Syndrome, after the Billy Joel song written from the perspective of a steel mill worker who is disappointed that the middle class factory jobs his parents and grandparents worked at are disappearing.
That seems to be the main complaint of the neo-Luddites: that it will no longer be possible to learn a small set of simple skills and get 40 years of steady, middle-class work at a big established company.
The extent to which that was ever possible is a bit of an illusion. A growing, dynamic economy is always displacing workers and makes no guarantees to anyone. But the rise of robotics raises the bar higher. As an increasing range of physical tasks can be automated, as can an increasing range of mental tasks involving perceptual-level skills of memory and pattern-recognition, workers will increasingly find it is necessary to make a living from higher-level thinking skills--both for the work itself, and for the task of figuring out what skills to acquire and what opportunities to pursue.
Anything else is becoming obsolete. Plan on it.
