About The Episode
This episode explores the concept of Technological Unemployment. Discussions of automation and how it will impact jobs typically end in two points of view:
1. Technology will eliminate the need for human physical and mental labour.
2. Technological growth will continuously create new forms of work that don’t exist even today. This episode explores the first point of view.
Additional Notes:
Though the examples used comes from Western countries, this is not to discount the developing world at all which still has large labour percentages in agriculture, but are making incredibly fast moves to manufacturing and service sectors, much faster than the developed world ever did. Simply using the developed world as the example of already applied technology.
Regarding the comparisons between modern companies and historical ones, even though they might not be perfect comparisons and certainly this isn’t the case in every situation as ex amazon hires over 600,000 people or google has over 100,000, whereas Toyota has 370,000 ppl (272 billion revenue), amazon has 232 Billion revenue.
The point was to show that through new digital technology fewer people are needed to generate massive impact
Transcript
Job automation. 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 job impacts. 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 vehicles trials starting in new cities, or short publicized 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. But before examining the individual puzzle pieces I think it is a good idea to start off by looking at the larger picture of job automation itself to give the future conversations some context. To do this we need to begin with the two main points of view of job automation.
I, like many, have had a considerable number of conversations with people about technology and automation and the discussion nearly always tends to steer towards one main question, will most jobs be eliminated in the future (or more likely will my job be eliminated)? I’m sure you’ve experienced the same if you’ve talked to people about this topic as well. The conversation usually boils down to people taking one of two sides, those who believe that with the advancement of robotics, autonomous vehicles, and artificial general intelligence, human effort will be made mostly or even entirely unnecessary and our metallic and digital offspring will perform our work faster, cheaper, and more efficiently, than we ever could..OR you can take the side that with all these new technologies new jobs for humans will constantly be created as new industries and entire domains are born that don’t even exist today. As the second point will be discussed in the next episode, lets first look at the point of view that human effort will be made unnecessary
What is Technological unemployment?
Technological unemployment! This is the term used to describe technology replacing human workers in a job, either replacing their physical capabilities, or as we are seeing more and more today, their mental job tasks making, any further human effort essentially not-required. There are of course intermediate steps that occur before complete automation happens, but this will be the focus of a future episode. A great example of the technological unemployment trend is the elevator operator (which, my grandfather, as a new immigrant from France in the 1960’s, took as his first job in Vancouver hotel for a few months). If you’re not familiar with this ex-job, it consisted of Someone having to stand in the elevator, open and close the door for the elevator travelers, as well as manually gauge the speed and slow the elevator with a large lever so it would stop parallel to the desired floor. However once the control system was built, it enabled the elevator to automatically adjust the speed, as well as stop at the desired floor with the precision we all expect today. There was thus little to no need for elevator operators anymore and the job quickly dried up as the profession was automated mostly in the 70’s. Luckily my grandfather had already moved on before this happened. This example clearly showcases manual automation, where a repetitive and relatively simple action is able to be done more efficiently by a mechanical system. This form of automation has been really going full steam since the first industrial revolution. We’ve built a prolific amount of machines that have reduced the need for human physical labour in all domains of society including: transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. Though this trend continues even today in greater degrees of sophistication, we have for the most part already shifted the developed world from agriculture to manufacturing and finally to service forms of work in a few short centuries. Even in 1900 all Western countries still had around an average of 60% of their labour force within agriculture, compared to today’s 1-5% today depending on which area you look at. (Eg. USA is under 2%, Europe still has some 4%) As compared to roughly 80% (USA) and 70% (EU) today for the service sector.
Less need for humans to do actual work
Through the implementation of new technologies, jobs, and the individuals performing them have undergone an absolutely incredible shift, and most would argue for the better. However, 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.
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. Take this podcast for example, I can research topics using the internet, record and edit using software, and publish to online platforms, all by just using my computer. I don’t need individual research, production, and marketing teams. More well known 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 are fundamentally the same. 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 News of autonomous vehicles trials in 1929 which produced 4000 cars a day, or today’s 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.
Given the combination of these ideas, it is easy to see how some react to this discussion in similar thought to the Luddites and their smashing of weaving machines that threatened to replace them back in the first industrial revolution, or at the very least some existential fear of what the future holds as the possible reduced need for humans in jobs comes about. Will doctors, lawyers, teachers, waiters, pilots, taxi and truck drivers, go the way of elevator operators, lamplighters, log drivers, switchboard operators, and lectors of the past?
Final thought of episode 1.
So this is a general summary of the first position someone can take in the discussion of the impact of technology on jobs. However, what has recent history shown us? Is this actually what has happened? In the next episode well look the other side of this discussion and the view that things might not be so different from what has already happened.
