When machines do your job
July 13, 2012 | Source: Technology Review
Race Against the Machine, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Are American workers losing their jobs to machines?
That was the question posed by Race Against the Machine, an influential e-book published last October by MIT business school researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
The pair looked at troubling U.S. employment numbers — which have declined since the recession of 2008-2009 even as economic output has risen — and concluded that computer technology was partly to blame.
Advances in hardware and software mean it’s possible to automate more white-collar jobs, and to do so more quickly than in the past. Think of the airline staffers whose job checking in passengers has been taken by self-service kiosks. While more productivity is a positive, wealth is becoming more concentrated, and more middle-class workers are getting left behind.
What does it mean to have “technological unemployment” even amidst apparent digital plenty? Technology Review spoke to McAfee at the Center for Digital Business, part of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where as principal research scientist he studies new employment trends and definitions of the workplace.
Comments (24)
by Tom
To his credit, President Obama recently mentioned advancing technology as a cause of job loss (he cited bank tellers being replaced by ATM’s as an example). The president however, was quickly shouted down by both sides of the aisle. He also proposed a solution, namely education..which won’t work because lawyers, doctors and other professionals are/will be displaced by ultra Watson-like machines. Humans are simply too error prone, expensive to train and costly to update compared to the cost of developing and maintaining intellignet machines.
The vast majority of people are presently unaware or incapable of seeing the rise of machines as a cheaper, safer and more cost effective alternative to the human labor force. As I see it we are in the middle of a paradigm shift from human to machine labor. Machines can build better and safer cars, aircraft, Jeapordy contestants, chess players, rubix cube solvers, factory workers, war machines of all types…..
There will probably be an “Oh Shit” moment when the politicians and economists realize the old ways of thinking about jobs and the economy are obsolete.
by Renzo Canepari
Jochen: Forty years ago, our society allowed me to vote for the first time. A Methodist minister who proposed a guaranteed annual income ran against a crook. People said that the minister was too liberal, so the crook won.
by trakk
jobs are not less….people are more.
by Roberto
You are all talking about “resource based economy”. There are people out there already working toward it. Jacqe Fresco? Venus Project? Anyone…?
Try venusproject.com
by Editor
How is Jacques doing? A fascinating project. I need to catch up.
by Roberto
He’s 96 an holding seminars around the world so I’d say he’s doing well. The Zeitgeist Movement supports RBE and they have chapters all around the world producing multmedia for informative purposes, trying to create critical mass.
I’ll be in Venus on the 25th of August so maybe I’ll have some first hand news. If someone would like to put Jacques & Roxanne some question, please feel free to tell me.
by Editor
Thanks. I’ll send some.
by Roberto
Feel free to mail me: carboni at robertocarboni dot it
by Bri
Unbelievable post! Thanks Roberto, the Venus project is 100% pure truth! Everyone should whatch it. In the movie Twister, you can see a yin and yang symbol, in the Doppler radar image of the twister. Yin yang reflects the binary nature of the torus. Check out the Osirium part. No Egyptian king was ever buried in the pyramids. If you calculate the number of blocks of stone, to the twenty year time line, that egyptologists say it was built in, they would have to, quarry, dress, move, and place a stone every five minutes, 24/7. Check out Ancientcanalbuilders. Com to see more of that ancient culture. As for the illuminati, they will have to deal with robots and job loss. Only people can consume! I like the butterfly analogy at the end. Right on target. The Singularity is near!!! Thrive.Com, Thrive.com!!!
by Enrienri
@MarkOates, I liked your post a lot, I have some other ideas to complement it, like I believe that scientific research should be done by large organisms of scientists open sourcing their results, like the CERN or NASA, in order to attain the singulartity faster and live better lifes. Also, I think we should change the patent system to shorter ones (like 5 years), to further technological growth.
by DrDubious
So it will be machines that finally destroy Capitalism.
by Jochen
@MarkOates, That was a great read. I think the solution to “technological unemployment” is a general annual income that guarantees everyone access to the basic goods and services regardless of their status in society. This concept has been discussed back and forth for decades, but it looks like the time is right soon.
by Bri
I agree with the annual income concept as a starting point. What system we ultimately use, will have to be worked out. The desire for more money, and to better ones position, is a strong driving force, for economic growth. This topic will only increase, in it’s urgency. The sooner we realize that it is inevitable, the sooner we should plan to releave the societal pain. Even if world leaders don’t want to tackle it, doesn’t mean the issues can’t be explore in a open debate format. As it becomes more clear to those with lots of money, they will be more incline to come on board, as commerce declines, from inadequate income . In my eyes, it should become quite dramatic, and more than evident.
by rob falgiano
I’m less confident the wealthy are interested in dealing with the problem for the masses. I think they are already working on the problem as it affects themselves by amassing as much wealth as possible to prepare for a possible unstable future. Thus the increasing trend of wealth disparity.
by GatorALLin
…to be honest… I love to use the self service options myself as much as possible. I am always faster and even more accurate than letting a clerk do it for me. I hate the list of stupid questions…. “did you find everything you were looking for…?” Or …”is this all for you today?” I want to answer..No, I like to get only half my items at a time…if you could hold the line for an hour, then I will be right back…”. Or no I could not find the tomatoes… and thought how wise of me to wait to ask you to get them for me now that I am checking out.”….. really? Is it me or do the stupid questions they are trained to ask you seem like one step down from a robot that could do this job, only faster and save me costs in the process (if it costs the store less, then maybe my prices go down with that). I don’t think this country needs more minimum wage jobs… Can’t we let the robots or computers do that for us… and leave the higher level and creative jobs (that pay real money) for well trained humans? All those jobs that went to china…. do you really want them….? The job of the guy assembling shoes for Nike who sits and glues shoe bottoms to the tops for 9/hours/day…. do you really want that job at $8/hour (he does it for $2/hour so its no wonder those jobs were earned away from america). Nike still sells that shoe for $95/each and pays $2 to china to make them and $0.50 for shipping and packaging costs… guess who makes the other $92.50 (ok maybe if they are Michael Jordon Airs then Michael gets $20 and Nike gets the remaining $72.50….so the American company makes all the money… and pays the high level jobs to designers and…. Just saying..
by Gorden Russell
These self-service kiosks must start paying unemployment taxes to support the people they have eliminated.
by MarkOates
Everyone is trying to convince me that there will always be jobs. My Aunt, some professors, our dear leader Kurzweil, all come from different places but argue that newer jobs will be created at the top, and lower, more menial jobs will be phased out.
Personally, I’m not convinced. I think robotics and automation are simply fundamentally disrupting how people are able to accumulate wealth. The truth to me is that as people are trained in these higher-caliber jobs, they’re simply going to be phased out in several years, too. Eventually, and probably somewhat suddenly, all of us will realize that survival (food, water, shelter) isn’t something that needs to be worked for anymore and those resources are ubiquitous and available to everyone at virtually no cost (thanks to automation and computation). Entire structures and institutions will become comically useless. A travel agency is a fantastic example, a Hollywood studio orchestra is another. Over our lifetime, the human species will slowly slip into an optimized infrastructure of goods and services, where this “default” position for a human will be without a need for sufficient labor or cost. Air conditioning, automobiles, telephones, access to information. These kinds of things aren’t taking away and/or creating jobs, they’re fundamentally changing the way we exist.
Assuming that we are in an economic slump because of these technological changes (which I do believe), I find it difficult to see why all of the proposed solutions are looking backward – e.g. support and attempt to replant what was working before. We’re moving into a completely different time, and right now is more of a “limbo” than an economic slump.
For the past several years I’ve felt that times in the future are going to get pretty bad… and then several years later they will become unimaginably good. If people could internalize this, it would make this current downturn seem like one of the best times to be a witness to the existence of the human. You get to be the last generation to ever see a person suffering from a disease, or deteriorating because of old age. And, you get a front seat as medical science finally begins to achieve a comprehensive wrapper around the human biological milieu, fantastically orchestrating precision-strikes on any ailments that come up.
The problem isn’t jobs or wealth, it’s that jobs and wealth have always been at the hip of society. The idea that we simply wouldn’t need them seems unknowable to us. The one-world-community is like a building, and money and labor are like the scaffolding that has been erected around it to facilitate and expedite its construction. We’re seeing the glimmers, and that scaffolding is starting to just get in the way.
WOW I typed a lot! Sorry I made you read through all of it :P
( Why did I write all that? :S )
by Bri
Hit the nail right on the the head! It is what Peter Diamandis wrights about. Soon, incredible abundance, short term, lots of birth pangs. Where in for a bumpy ride!
by Dennis R.
I think all of that is possible, but in the near future (and how long will that be?) it’s also a matter of resources and distribution and the perceived need for all these humans. Seven billion people with nothing to do but lie around all day and breed? We’re not all going to turn into angels at some point because of Moore’s Law.
MarkOates is basically talking about redistribution of the wealth on a planet-wide scale. I don’t necessarily find this horrendous but a lot of people do.
The people who still “own” most resources will be tempted to hoard and selectively distribute what they want to whom they want. I don’t know if it’s human nature, but some of us still like to think we’re better than a lot of other people. Just like those who believe in the Rapture, some people think not everyone deserves to live forever.
by Joe Atiyah
@MarkOates
Good post, but remember this is a very western viewpoint. There are many parts of the world that have decades to go before they even get to our problems. Also think you are a tad optimistic about the end of disease etc. – yes someday, but not in my lifetime (sadly).
Much of this is discussed elsewhere on the web – see Martin Ford’s site, and his book ‘The lights in the tunnel’.
Also don’t underestimate the ability of bureaucracy to invent and sustain jobs – read Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ books – full of various diplomats even tho nobody has to work for basic needs. And some people want to work; I am happy being retired, but some of my friends are not.
But for sure we are going to have to rethink the business model of our society, and most politicians dont realise this (my M.P. does because I emailed her on this topic a while back), also posted about it on my blog
http://joeatiyah.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/future-of-work-and-jobs.html
Interesting times ahead!
by Cybernettr
In the time in between all of this job loss and the new Era of Abundance, just how bad will it get? Will there be another Great Depression? Will there be race wars and riots? The answer will depend on just how long the transitional period lasts.
by digitalcole
That is a very real problem, joblessness is set to become a pandemic and leadership (at least in the US) is still talking about jobs coming back. I haven’t even seen a hint of the sort of national discussions we need to be having concerning mechanization.
by rob falgiano
Agreed. It’s the elephant down the hall, heading for the room.
by Bob Vasquez
Machines, true. But, let’s now forget outsourcing (as it is now called).