About The Episode
When I started this podcast I had a clear goal of exploring the topic of automation and how it is impacting jobs. Specifically whether the large fear of technological unemployment was upon us many of the impactful books were saying: like the 2nd machine age, rise of the robots, robots will steal your job but thats ok, or whether we were living through a continuous state of creative destruction, where old jobs were made obsolete but gave rise to new ones at a roughly equal rate over time.
Over the last 99 episodes through both the solo presentations as well as the numerous expert interviews, I think this question has reached a pretty decent understanding. So as a timely wrap up I’ll be focusing on the main points discovered before discussing the future of the podcast. But to start off with, I want to reframe the need of the podcast again, why is technological unemployment important, and why even look at this topic?
Transcript
Why is Technological Unemployment Important?
Firstly, I think why this issue is so intriguing for so many people is because even if you aren’t working in a field dealing with robotics or automation on a day to day basis you still come into contact with technologies or news of technologies and their possible impacts on jobs. A very visual example is the self-checkout machines in many super markets today that we are aware of or might even use exclusively. News of autonomous vehicle trials starting in new cities, or short games where someone tries to guess which article was written by a human and which by an AI. Then there are the occasional headlines showing a new fully automated hotel, restaurant, or warehouse opening in a new city across the world. These small puzzle pieces create a picture of a looming unknown future in our minds where we start seeing that human labour might be replaced by robotic machines or digital systems.
Secondly, when considering future scenarios with job automation, fear lies in the fact that modern technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, drones, iot, etc will be able to do many of the physical as well as the cognitive tasks that most human workers do today. This can effectively cause an impact on the service sector greater than what happened with agriculture over the last 100 years, which now only employs 3% of the labour force compared to 40 to 50% that it used to.
The main problem with this, apart from the speed at which it is happening, is that a new sector might not require or need the amount of human labour as previous sectors did, even at its start because of the now physical and cognitive automation tools effectively replacing tasks traditionally done by humans. Classic examples are Instagram only having 13 employees though having roughly 30 million users before being bought for 1 billion dollars, or modern individual Youtube stars able to have millions consuming their content without elaborate production teams, or as we’ve seen, the start of fully automated businesses are emerging that even if the founder were to walk away the business continues without a hitch. These cases are possible because they are using the current digital technologies that gives each individual more independent working power. This can be compared to the ford motor company which employed over 100,000 workers at their flagship factory The Rouge in 1929 which produced 4000 cars a day, or todays largest news broadcaster the BBC with 35,000 employees. These lopsided examples show a clear departure from historical intensive human labour requirements of agriculture, manufacturing and service industries. In other words, through new digital technologies smaller and smaller numbers of people are enabled to generate massive impact, whereas it would previously have taken an army of people to generate a similar impact. So we have two trends that seem to be merging today to add fuel to technological unemployment, automation of physical and mental tasks along with fewer people required to generate large impact. But is this happening in only specific industries or is it more widespread?
