Article; Will Automatons Take Over Jobs?

Reference: http://ideas.ted.com/will-automation-take-away-all-our-jobs/

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-Notes-

I. Many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor.

II. As our tools improve, technology magnifies our leverage and increases the importance of our expertise, judgment and creativity.

III. We’ve faced equally momentous economic transformations in the past, and we’ve come through them successfully.

-Notices-

I. Automating a subset of a position’s tasks doesn’t make the other ones unnecessary — in fact, it makes them more important.

II. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity.

III. Once we create a technology that makes us sufficiently productive at something, we’ve basically worked our way out of a job.

IV. What this highlights is the primacy of our institutions, most especially our schools, in allowing us to reap the harvest of our technological prosperity. On many occasions in the last two centuries, scholars and activists have raised the alarm that we were running out of work and making ourselves obsolete.

-Important-

I. In general, automating some subset of a position’s tasks doesn’t make the other ones unnecessary — in fact, it makes them more important and increases their economic value.

II. Automation creates wealth by allowing us to do more work in less time, but there is no economic law which mandates we will use our wealth well, and this is something worth worrying about.

III. What’s more, many citizens cannot qualify for the good jobs that are being created.

IV. The reasons behind the contracting middle are not mysterious — many middle-skill jobs use well-understood rules and procedures that increasingly can be codified in software and executed by computers. The challenge this phenomenon creates is that it knocks out rungs in the economic ladder, shrinks the size of the middle class, and threatens to make us a more stratified society, divided between highly paid, highly educated professionals doing interesting work and low-wage employees whose primary responsibility is to see to the comfort and health of the affluent.

-Record-

I. Tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil. Assembly lines were engineered to replace inconsistent human handiwork with machine perfection. Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection.

II. Banks quickly discovered ATMs also made it cheaper to open new branches, so the number of bank branches increased by about 40 percent in the same time period. The net result was more branches and more tellers. As their routine, cash-handling tasks receded, they became less like checkout clerks and more like salespeople, forging relationships with customers, solving problems and introducing them to new products like credit cards, loans and investments. They were doing a more cognitively demanding job.

III. Many of the industries in which we now work — health and medicine, finance and insurance, electronics and computing — were tiny or barely existent a century ago. Many of the products that we purchase, like air conditioners, sport utility vehicles, computers and mobile devices, were unattainably expensive, or just hadn’t been invented back then. As automation frees our time and increases the scope of what is possible, we invent new products, new ideas and new services that command our attention, occupy our time and spur consumption.
Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity, or, in the words of economist Thorstein Veblen, invention is the mother of necessity.

IV. The challenge today is not that we’re running out of work — the US has added 14 million jobs since the 2008 recession — but that many of those jobs are not good jobs.

V. High-education, high-wage jobs, like doctors and nurses, programmers and engineers, and marketing and sales managers. Employment and employment growth are robust in those professions. Similarly, growth is robust in many low-skill, low-education jobs, like food service, cleaning, security and home-health work. At the same time, employment is shrinking in many middle-education, middle-wage, middle-class jobs, like blue-collar production and operative positions and white-collar clerical and sales positions.


-Statistics-

I. In the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine, those vending machines that dispense cash, the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million in 1970 to a half a million today, with 100,000 added since the year 2000.

II. The fraction of US adults employed in the labor market is higher now in 2016 than it was in 1890, and it’s risen in just about every decade in the intervening 125 years. This poses a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work for us.