About The Episode
Coming back to the central argument that there are two futures with job impact, today we look at 3 ideas that support a future where jobs are automated away.
Transcript
Relevant News
So before jumping into today’s episode I wanted to touch on a bit of relevant news, and the first has to deal with what many people seem to be talking about, the coronavirus.
I found it really interesting to read that the first warnings of the virus were sent out not by a whistleblower or some news agency but actually from an AI! The Canadian Bluedot algorithm scours international news reports and airline ticket data specifically to predict disease spread. It supposedly sent out a warning on Dec 31, whereas the US centres for disease control and prevention only put out a notice on January 6th followed by the world health organisation on January 9. If BlueDot’s alert had motivated travel restrictions sooner, the numbers of infected cases may have been far more controlled. With machine learning and natural language processing, data can be organized and acted upon with the urgency that infectious diseases require. Algorithms like BlueDot and similar data-driven decision engines will be essential for preserving global population health as networks proliferate. Do you think you’d trust an AI warning more than a traditional institution’s?
Even with the economic slowdown in China, Foodom Robotic Restaurant opened in Dongguan on January 12! This is a fully automated restaurant that has almost 50 robots in operation. I have a link to a short video of what the restaurant looks like in the show notes if you want to see, but fully automated restaurants has been something that has been tried and talked about for several years now. It’ll be interesting to follow this and see if the number of restaurants grow in China.
On a controversial note, on February 6th a South Korean TV documentary showed a mother interact with a VR recreation of her 7 year old daughter, who had died in 2016 from an incurable disease. I won’t weigh in on the moral implications of such a thing, I think we all will have our perspective on such a dystopian event but what I will say is that this isn’t a one time thing and fits into the creation of digital avatar that I spoke about in episode 16. There are even a couple of startups focused exclusively on this now.
I have to thank my friend Amy for bringing this to my attention. Also, if you have any interesting articles/news that you think would be interesting for me to mention in the podcast please send them my way, as I think it helps make what is discussed on the podcast a little more tangible.
Intro
Up till now many of the previous episodes showcased specific technologies that have the potential to automate a large number of jobs. I also think that in the back of many people’s mind this idea of a more or completely automated future already exists, simply due to the impressive capabilities of many of the new and emerging technologies that are showcased in various media platforms. However, at the start of this podcast I set the context for the future of jobs as having one of two possible futures. Essentially one future deals with continuous job creation, and the other with massive job replacement via automation technologies. I want to bring back this central idea and add to both of these perspectives with today’s podcast as well as next week’s. Next week I will present on continuous job creation while today, I want to present three ideas that support the future notion of a jobless future. The first idea is that of the ‘fake job economy’ that rose sharply during the economic recession brought on my the 2008 financial crises. Secondly, the idea of bullshit jobs, as proposed by David Graeber, and thirdly a look at a few of the jobs that have already disappeared and the next jobs that are predicted to disappear.
Fake Jobs
As a warm up idea let’s look at the notion of fake jobs, also known as practice firms/virtual companies/ or Potemkin business, which really shocked me when I first heard about it 5 years ago. In 2015 many articles came out about the fake job movement predominantly occurring in Europe. At a high point in dealing with the European unemployment struggle, EU countries broadened the use of practice firms that had been established in 1993. These practice firms started out as training programs to help students at the outset of their careers or people between jobs gain workplace skill. Essentially these were jobs, with physical offices, accounting, sales, and marketing departments, ceos etc with just one catch, they didn’t have any products. Take Candelia, a French office furniture business. They had no furniture that was being made, all customers were part of other practice firms, revenue and expenses were digitally generated and the online catalog was just imaginary. In an attempt to combat the rise of unemployment during the 2008 crisis their use increased as people stayed there for years, long term unemployed people worked at fake companies. Thousands of fake companies across Europe hired fake employees to sell fake products to fake customers. Some of the fake companies even fell into fake bankruptcy, and the fake staff went on to set up new fake companies, taking out fake loans from fake banks. Other fake companies even held strikes. Many ‘employees’ mentioned an increase in confidence since starting at these fake jobs. With the economic recovery we have seen over the last several years, I wasn’t able to find evidence of the same amount of long term stays in these fake businesses as before. However, there are currently till over 7000 of these practice enterprises across the world. But if the automated future perspective is to be the dominant future, this account of the fake jobs economy might be something that governments use again to deal with rising unemployment caused by automation technologies as they continue to outperform humans in many of the jobs we currently do. Do you think you’d want to work at a fake job for a number of years, or possibly indefinitely?
Bullshit Jobs
Another argument for the automated future argument comes from David Graeber and his sketch of bullshit jobs. Even if new jobs are being created, many of them might not serve any purpose whatsoever, even if they aren’t in a fake company. But what is a bullshit job? “It is paid work that meets two conditions. Firstly, it is so completely useless and unnecessary that even the employee cannot justify its existence. Secondly, as part of the work relationship, the employee and his or her colleagues, even though they feel their job is bullshit, act as if what they do is important.” Essentially if the bullshit job disappeared, nobody in the world would notice it. Graeber classifies 5 different types of bullshit jobs: Flunkies, Goons, Duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.
Flunkies are jobs created to make their superiors feel important. Administrative assistants and receptionists are used as an example because you yourself seem very important if you do not answer your phone yourself. The greater your span of control as a manager, the more important you are.
Goons describe the people who do work that actually only exists because others do it too. Examples are the army, Public Relations functions and marketing departments. Think of building an army because other regions are doing it first, or a company must do marketing because a competitor will have an advantage if they do not do it. The world would not end if the marketing manager position ceased to exist and we were not seeing advertising every day that encourages us to buy products that have no impact on the quality of our lives.
Duct tapers are the jobs that exist because the product or process is not well designed so that people are solving issues. Software developers who need to continuously update shoddy code, customer service jobs that constantly have to apologize on behalf of their company for not delivering the promised service etc.
Box tickers include the jobs needed to prove that an organization is doing something. The best example of this type of work came from an NGO supported by a large company. The large company wanted to have many progress reports to show that supporting charities is valuable and that they supported this valuable charity. But, instead of doing to the real project, the money was used to manage people who had to create all those reports.
This category of jobs includes shifting paperwork, especially in governments and the insurance industry. Entitlement to benefits, allowances, payments of claims, thousands of people have a job designing forms for these kind of services: checking, awarding money, talking to people who ultimately do not receive money, and there are even entire companies that make money by coaching people how to fill out all those forms.
Finally, Taskmasters, those who manage or create work for those who don’t need it. A good example is middle management that redistributes and even creates useless tasks for others. Many types of project managers, consultants, coaches and middle management positions can fall into this category.
Sooooo…the question is then, do you have a bullshit job?
If you think you do you’re not alone. There were 2 surveys done on this specific question in the UK and the Netherlands by the market research firm YouGov. 40% of people surveyed concluded that they had bullshit jobs….If this is in fact true and applicable to most other Western countries, I’ll just leave it up to your own imagination as to how this idea supports the idea of future job automation.
Jobs that have disappeared and jobs that are expected to disappear.
Finally there are of course numerous jobs and entire professions that have become obsolete and disappeared over the course of human history. I’ll have some links to articles with long lists of these but I just want to highlight a few that I think are interesting because not only did they disappear recently but they also came into existence relatively recently as well.
- Perhaps one of the most iconic jobs that has become obsolete due to new technology is the Switchboard operator. As discussed in the holiday episode, people used to be responsible for connecting people calling other phones. Though the job lasted for almost exactly 100 years. This can now be done entirely digitally.
- Movie projectionist. I think I mentioned in a previous episode that I worked as a movie projectionist during my student days, moving the film through a complicated projector so that it would play for the audience. As I was leaving this job, the first digital projectors were being installed and they are now the norm in theatres today. This job also lasted about 100 years.
- Also mentioned in one of the first episodes the elevator operator is an obsolete trade. Lasting a little over 100 years, though it still does exist today, but mostly for show.
- Word Processor: Before computers, there were typists who took shorthand or dictation and typed it up. With computers coming into mainstream use typists moved to word processing departments. Now with word processing software like Microsoft Word, and even voice to text apps, there are fewer and fewer word processing and typists jobs out there, and they are dwindling in number every year.
- Video Store clerk: The first video store opened in 1977 in Los Angeles. With blockbuster going bankrupt in 2010 and the ‘streaming wars’ between Netflix, Disney+, amazon, etc in full swing, the video store clerk is well on their way out.
Though the jobs described are either completely or very nearly eradicated, other jobs have been predicted to be very likely to vanish in the next decade or two. A few of these are all forms of drivers, fast food workers, cashiers, legal secretaries, executive and administrative assistants, parking enforcement telephone operators etc. Though these are of course just a few select examples, one of the reasons I chose these is that I think they illustrate a trend. Namely that the further back in history you look, jobs existed for greater periods of time after their creation, whereas now there are clear examples where entire professions are made and destroyed in shorter intervals, even in the span of one’s own lifetime. The main point is that long standing skills and professions are not necessarily going to be around simply because they have been for a long time. But what will replace them? Next week we will look at this with the opposite side of the main argument, namely the skills and jobs of the future.
