We’re always looking to pin our problems on a villain. It makes us feel a little better. When it comes to the ongoing debate about creating and protecting jobs, that villain has varied over the years: Japan Inc. industrialists, dot-com flim-flam (con) men, free-trade fanatics, the offshore menace, the Wall Street 1%.
In the 2015 jobs narrative, the main villain is the robot, an adversary that literally doesn’t have a heart. Robots and their artificially intelligent kin, we’re told, eventually will replace everyone from package deliverers, retail store greeters, airport baggage handlers, and truck drivers to novelists, airline pilots, accountants, and doctors.
A rigorous 2013 University of Oxford study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne argues that advances in computers, automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) eventually will put 47% of US jobs at risk.
But the prevailing pessimism reflects a fundamental lack of imagination. People are extrapolating the technological advances they see coming to a static version of tomorrow’s economy, failing to imagine the possibility that those advances could create all manner of new and different opportunities and jobs.
When Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor in the 1940s, did most people imagine the myriad products, services, vendors, vendor ecosystems, offshoot industries, and hundreds of millions of jobs that it would spawn? Or did they just see computers replacing lots of jobs at abacus and typewriter manufacturers as the transistor was commercialised?
Today’s employment pessimists remind me of English scholar Thomas Malthus, who predicted two centuries ago that population growth would soon overwhelm man’s ability to prosper, even subsist. Malthus, of course, failed to envisage the productivity acceleration of the coming industrial and technological revolutions.
Likewise, the pessimists of today fail to envisage the many jobs still to be created in coming generations of technological progress—precisely because we can’t know today what all of those jobs will be.
Forbes writer John Tamny raises a critical point in a recent post on this subject: “It’s in poor countries that the nature of work is static. In rich ones, we constantly innovate away the toil of the past in favour of more prosperous work forms that are less back-breaking, and even better, consume less of our time.”
This progress means that we, as a collective labour force, can spend fewer hours digging ditches and filing forms and more time doing work that really improves other people’s lives: treating and curing diseases, creating new sources of renewable energy, improving education, growing food more productively, raising financial capital to start and expand businesses.
Two Waves of Job Destruction
That deep disruption won’t be a trivial matter; it’s not to be dismissed. But let’s not be so quick to kiss off most of today’s jobs either. When we look to the future, even an AI-dominated future, we tend to underestimate the value and power of human presence, emotion, creativity, and flexibility.
It’s as if we think musicians, teachers, counselors, caregivers, coaches, clergy, trial lawyers, architects, writers, business strategists, and entrepreneurs are only imperfect droids to be replaced with perfect (and less costly) ones.
People bring a lot to the workplace through their very humanity. Intelligent machines (like ones today that do predictive data analytics) are more likely to complement human activity and decision-making, not replace them completely.
Take healthcare: Medical practices, clinics, hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices do more than just run tests, render diagnoses, and perform procedures. They provide total patient care.
Technology promises to improve their efficiency and accuracy—and we certainly need to figure out ways to keep rising healthcare costs in check—but total care requires human input, intervention, adaptability, and empathy.
Meantime, robotics and AI could very well become the transistor of the twenty-first century—the foundation for lots of new products, services, industries, and career paths that are inconceivable today.
And let’s not ignore the demographic fact that low birth rates in Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and other industrialised countries signal a big labour shortage to come in those countries—translating to US$10tril (RM37tril) of lost GDP over the next one to two decades, according to a recent Boston Consulting Group report.
In his recent keynote address at CloudWorld Tokyo, Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison noted that Japan in particular sees robots as a solution to its labor problems, not as a contributor.
The full employment challenge ahead is less about surviving under the cold reign of the robots and more about two other factors: improving education and training to prepare people for tomorrow’s economy, and reworking the tax and regulatory codes with an eye toward promoting growth and job creation.
Perhaps our robotic overlords will be able to help us there.
Rob Preston is editorial director in Oracle’s Content Central organisation. This article was contributed to Asia News Network.
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