Businesses Moving Too Quickly?
Are businesses are moving too quickly to robots? Is any job safe?
Patrick Thibodeau at Computer World discusses the idea things are
moving "too fast" with a review of Nicholas Carr's new book, The
Glass Cage, Automation and Us.
Please consider Automation Could Take Your Skills -- and Your Job by
Patrick Thibodeau.
The Glass Cage examines the possibility that businesses
are moving too quickly to automate white collar jobs, sophisticated tasks and
mental work, and are increasingly reliant on automated decision-making and
predictive analytics. It warns of the potential de-skilling of the workforce,
including software developers, as larger shares of work processes are turned
over to machines.
This book is not a defense of Luddites. It's a well-anchored examination of
the consequences and impact about deploying systems designed to replace us.
Interview with Carr
Thibodeau posted a lengthy set of interview questions in regards to the book,
along with answers from Carr.
Here are a few snips (emphasis added).
CW: What is the worry here? If I can get into my self-driving car in
the morning, I can sit back and work on other things.
Carr: There are two worries. One is practical and the other is
philosophical. We have to figure out how to best balance the
responsibilities between the human expert or professional and computer. I
think we're going down the wrong path right now. We're too quick to hand over
too much responsibility to the computer and what that ends up doing is
leaving the expert or professional in a kind of a passive role: looking
at monitors, following templates, entering data. The problem, and we see it
with pilots and doctors, is when the computer fails, when either the
technology breaks down, or the computer comes up against some situation that
it hasn't been programmed to handle, then the human being has to jump back in
take control, and too often we have allowed the human expert skills to get
rusty and their situational awareness to fade away and so they make
mistakes. At the practical level, we can be smarter and wiser about how we go
about automating and make sure that we keep the human engaged.
Then we have the philosophical side, what are human beings for? What
gives meaning to our lives and fulfills us? And it turns out that it is
usually doing hard work in the real world, grappling with hard challenges,
overcoming them, expanding our talents, engaging with difficult situations.
Unfortunately, that is the kind of effort that software programmers, for good
reasons of their own, seek to alleviate today.
CW: Gartner recently came out with a prediction that in approximately
10 years about one third of all the jobs that exist today will be replaced by
some form of automation. That could be an over-the-top prediction or not. But
when you think about the job market going forward, what kind of impact do you
see automation having?
Carr: I think that prediction is probably over aggressive. It's very
easy to come up with these scenarios that show massive job losses. I think
what we're facing is probably a more modest, but still ongoing destruction or
loss of white collar professional jobs as computers become more capable of
undertaking analyses and making judgments. A very good example is in the
legal field, where you have seen, and very, very quickly, language processing
software take over the work of evidence discovery. You used to have lots of
bright people reading through various documents to find evidence and to
figure out relationships among people, and now computers can basically do all
that work, so lots of paralegals, lots of junior lawyers, lose their jobs
because computers can do them. I think we will continue to see that kind of
replacement of professional labor with analytical software. The job market is
very complex, so it's easy to become alarmist, but I do think the big
challenge is probably less the total number of jobs in the economy then the
distribution of those jobs. Because as soon as you are able to automate
what used to be very skilled task, then you also de-skill them and, hence,
you don't have to pay the people who do them as much. We will probably
see a continued pressure for the polarization of the workforce and the
erosion of good quality, good paying middle class jobs.
CW: What do you want people to take away from this work?
Carr: I think we're naturally very enthusiastic about technological
advances, and particularly enthusiastic about the ways that engineers and
programmers and other inventors can program inanimate machines and computers
to do hard things that human beings used to do. That's amazing, and I think
we're right to be amazed and enthusiastic about that. But I think often our
enthusiasm leads us to make assumptions that aren't in our best interest,
assumptions that we should seek convenience and speed and efficiency without
regard to the fact that our sense of satisfaction in life often comes from
mastering hard challenges, mastering hard skills. My goal is simply to
warn people.
I think we have a choice about whether we do this wisely and
humanistically, or we take the road that I think we're on right now, which is
to take a misanthropic view of technological progress and just say 'give
computers everything they can possibly do and give human beings whatever is
left over.' I think that's a recipe for diminishing the quality of life and
ultimately short-circuiting progress.
Is Carr a Luddite?
Thibodeau claims "Carr's book is not a defense of Luddites".
Let's look up the term Luddite.
According to Merriam-Webster a Luddite is "one of a group of early 19th
century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest;
broadly: one who is opposed to especially technological change"
Carr is not an extreme Luddite to the extent he wants to destroy machinery in
protest. However, in the broader sense, it's easy enough to make a case that
he is indeed a Luddite.
Loss of Skills
- Computers ended the need for a slide rule. The skill
simply vanished. Should anyone care? As a side note, I can still use a
slide rule. Many today have never heard of one. I have a totally useless
skill.
- Robots replaced human welders. Who does a better job?
The robot or the human welder? I suggest the robot. Yet, welding did not
and will not go away. No skills vanished. For quick repairs and
specialized jobs, human welders will not cease to exist. If I am wrong
and human welders do vanish completely, and as with slide rules, human
welding skills will no longer be useful.
- Cars replaced horses. Horse riding is still a skill, but
it has far fewer practical uses. Should anyone be concerned?
Computers, Robots, and the Quality of Life
The most curious position of Carr is his conclusion: Computer technology is
"a recipe for diminishing the quality of life".
Ring the eject buzzer on that one. With the possible exception of warfare and
nuclear accidents, there has never been any technological advance in history
that was a "recipe for diminished quality of life".
Yes, disruption is unwelcome to many. But Carr's worries are no different
than those who worried about cars replacing horses, the cotton gin replacing
seed separators, or the telephone replacing the telegraph.
Does anyone pity the widespread loss of Morse Code skills?
Curiously, although the slide rule vanished, Morse Code did not go away
completely as the link above shows. It still has some limited use
applications, and yes, I could do an SOS in Morse Code (but no one would pay
me a dime for that skill).
Will 1 in 3 Jobs Vanish by 2025?
Is Gartner right that One in three jobs will be taken by software or robots by 2025?
If so, should there be a concern?
Real Concern
The real concern should not be the loss of jobs, but rather the Fed's
response and governmental responses to price-deflation aspects.
Technology is inherently price deflationary. It's also wage deflationary
except for those at the top-end of needed skills.
Central bank efforts to achieve 2% inflation in a hugely deflationary
technological boom with a simultaneous and equally deflationary demographic
shift is a huge problem.
In addition, liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage exacerbates the trend
to move to robots.
If there is a "premature" move to robots, blame the Fed and
governments, not the technology, and not businesses making the shift.
Question on Wealth Distribution
Reader Michael asks ...
"As more and more wealth is produced using less and less labor,
society will be faced with the question of how to distribute this wealth.
Does only a tiny fraction of the world's population get to enjoy the wealth
or, do we realize that technology is enabling humans to enjoy more leisure
and still have a share of the wealth?"
To answer Michael's question ...
We should embrace technology and the increased standard of living that comes
with it. Yes, those at the top-end have amazing lifestyles that most can only
imagine. But, it's also true that the average US citizen today lives like a
king (and much longer) than someone 200 or even 100 years ago.
Every technological advance to date has been shared: computers, cell phones,
television, sewing machines, radio, everything. It in inconceivable (actually
impossible short of mass human extinction) for that trend to stop.
Everyone shares sooner or later. Competition ensures that outcome. Yet, it's
also inevitable that the need for certain skills dies along the way.
In the short run, disruption is scary, especially to those immediately
impacted. In the long run, the only fear should be of the central planner's
(governments and central banks) response to such shifts.
Those who fear technology have precisely the wrong concern.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
