The New York Times has conducted a bold experiment by asking a slightly confused librarian to tell us all what will happen when the robots come to take all our jobs. This works about as well as you would think it would to be honest. Take, for example, this:
Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. But that is not a sufficient answer. One historical example is no guarantee of future events, and we won’t be able to compete by trying to stay one step ahead in a losing battle.
That's making the assumption that there was one episode, called the Industrial Revolution, when manual labour was automated and thus we've only got that one single historical episode. Which is, of course, ridiculous. We've been automating every job we can ever since we worked out what it meant. A plough is an automated version of a man with a shovel and we've been ploughing the land for thousands of years now. We might also note that the historical reference books are littered with references to the second industrial revolution (roughly, the harnessing of electricity rather than steam power). But even that's not the whole story.
We've not had one, or two or three, episodes of automation. We've had perhaps three waves of it, that's true, first and second industrial and then that of agriculture (the tractor and so on, mostly post WWI and as Keynes said, one of the real structural problems underlying the economic problems of the 1930s). But they are really only crests of the the process that's been going on this past 300 years. That is, we've not had one historical incidence of automation and job replacement, we've had several hundred years of direct experience that this is how it works. The implication of this for public policy should be obvious. Sure, if it was just one experience then perhaps we should worry. If it's been the defining feature of the modern era, something that has been trundling along for those hundreds of years, then perhaps we might prefer to think of it as being normal, not an oddity?
This is also a little odd:
In the 1980s, the Harvard social scientist Shoshana Zuboff examined how some workplaces used technology to “automate” — take power away from the employee — while others used technology differently, to “informate” — to empower people.
For academics, software developers and corporate and policy leaders who are lucky enough to live in this “informate” model, technology has been good. So far. To those for whom it’s been less of a blessing, we keep doling out the advice to upgrade skills. Unfortunately, for most workers, technology is used to “automate” the job and to take power away.
If we recast this away from neologisms in social science and into good solid words in economics we would say that this is the difference between automation being a substitute for human labour and a complement to it. And this isn't particularly a feature of how we try to combine the technology and the labour, it's an innate feature of the technology. So it's not a matter of how we try to design the workplace, it's a function of the technologies that we uncover or invent.
More, if we've got a technology that does replace (ie, is a substitute for) human labour then we really do want to deploy it. So that that human labour which is now out of a job can go and do something else. Where some other technology is a complement to it and thus this raises the general productivity of the economy. We've got a cheap machine doing the original task, we've got our unique snowflake of a human being doing what requires a human being to do and we've thus got two things being produced that we all can consume.
Sure, we most definitely want to "informate" jobs, that's harnessing technology as a complement. But we don't want to stop "automate" as a process, we want to push on with that as fast as possible so that more people can move over to the informate part of the economy. It's that very process that has been making us all richer these past 300 years and as long as we keep doing it will continue to do so.
