Jobs are the easy part. It’s worth remembering every time a politician talks about “jobs created” by his or her economic program. They’re missing the point. True economic growth is an effect of the work not required of humans.
SalesForce founder Marc Benioff explained all of this so well in a recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. In an e-mail, Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane put it best in saying Benioff’s piece “shows the true nature of economic growth.”
Humans don’t grow because of the work they’re doing, but due to the work they’re not doing. If work were economic growth, we would simply abolish the wheel, the automobile, the computer, the smartphone, and the internet itself. If so, everyone would be working a great deal and everyone would be miserable a great deal.
Which is a truth that has yet to find its way into the heads of Trump administration officials, their rhetoric, or both. Benioff brings wisdom where there presently isn’t.
Writing about his own company, Benioff observes in excited fashion that customer service now includes “AI agents working with our 9,000 customer service representatives.” He notes that “In just three months,” always learning and improving AI agents “resolved 84% of incoming customer queries on their own, with only 2 percent of requests requiring escalation to humans.” The latter is rapidly driving down the internal cost of customer service, and as opposed to the automation of what used to require human effort leading to layoffs, Benioff writes that it “allows us to redeploy as many as 2,000 support roles elsewhere in the company.
To presume as some do that automation is the enemy of employees is the equivalent of the misguided view that extra humans flooding into a company, region, or country do so at the expense of those already there. In truth, productivity logically grows as the number of hands and machines working together grows. It’s something we all know intuitively.
When work is divided, those participating in the work get to specialize. That’s why one or a few working alone invariably produce so little, while myriad workers working together leads to prodigious amounts of production. Henry Ford was able to create cars for “the great multitude” on just the previous truth.
Ford Motor’s high pay proved a magnet for workers who divided up work in specialized fashion on the way to affordable automobiles that became more and more affordable as Ford improved labor division among growing amounts of people at his plants. With SalesForce’s investment in AI, it will similarly get to pay its more productively deployed workers more as it frees them from doing the things that machines can do for them.
Where it becomes quite a bit more exciting is in Benioff’s prediction that “Today’s CEOs are the final generation of executive leading exclusively human workforces.” Translated, the human workers of tomorrow will have working alongside them automated workers who will never need sleep, breaks at work, weekends, or vacations. It means the human workers of tomorrow will have superhuman productive capabilities, but even better, they’ll be much happier carrying out those capabilities exactly because what frees us from work frees us to specialize.
Crane is so right that what Benioff describes is the true nature of economic growth. It’s of the kind that will make the present sclerotic by comparison, and that will be too fast for politicians to meddle with or put up barriers to in the future.
