This
is a blog entry I last worked on in December of 2017. Like it says in the first
line of the following paragraph, I often start but never finish posts like
this. But I want to go ahead and publish this one because I think it's an
important topic.
Over
the past year or two, I have started a few posts on the topic of Work/The
Future of Work, but I never finished or published them, because it's an
amorphous concept at best for many people, and I try to keep my posts as
understandable (if boring) as possible for anyone who finds them.
For
many people this subject may be pretty new, and "out there." Someone
unfamiliar with the concept may say or think "Work? People talk about that
all the time!" But the topic I'm talking about is the nature of work itself
to mankind in general.
I
think one reason this topic is problematic for many is that people raised in
societies built on Judeo-Christian values are told from childhood that 1) Good
people enjoy work, 2) Bad people avoid work, and 3) God himself decreed in the
Bible that mankind is to live by the sweat of his brow.
In
this line of thinking, a loving God will always have work for man can find to
perform, so why would anyone try to dream up a situation (except for
extenuating circumstances) where there is no work? Not having work that needs
to be done is an alien thought for many people, and to wish or dream for such a
thing would even be considered 'sinful' by many. The problem is that
"work" means so many different things to different people. If I
hadn't had to do one type of work for 40+ hours a week at Taco Bell during my
freshman and sophomore years of college, I may have accomplished a lot more in
my life by now. Nonetheless, I would have still been working the entire time.
Even
though spiritual and political leaders teach that work is good and avoiding
hard work is lazy and bad, the free market has nonetheless pushed for the
invention of technology which can perform every bit of labor needed in the
world (harvesters, assembly line robots, roombas, etc.). Lately, this has even
starting to include non-labor work (thinking and management), which only humans
have been able to perform up to now. The acceleration of technology in general
means that leaders should be thinking about where these trends will eventually
take mankind.
Some
background:
Many
years ago, a man invented a series of science fiction stories set in a fictitious
future, where mankind made a few breakthrough inventions which changed
everything. We invented the ability to travel faster than the speed of light,
and the ability to turn matter into a signal in one place, and then turn around
and turn the signal back into the original object (or a copy of that object) in
a different location, or at a later time. This allowed someone to step into a
"de-materializing" machine in one location and step out of a
"re-materializing" machine hundreds or thousands of miles away, in
effect traveling without a vehicle. Perishable and non-perishable goods could
also be scanned in, stored as signals (data), and later as many copies as
needed could be replicated (materials, finished goods, fuel, even food).
They
had no need to mine most precious metals or minerals, because they could just
replicate whatever they needed. No need to farm when they could just replicate
all the fruits and vegetables they needed (or even cooked dishes). No need to
spin cloth or sew when they could just replicate all the cloth or clothes they
need.
Because
of this, (in this man's fictional future world), mankind stopped using money,
and was no longer forced to live by the sweat of his or her brow. People did
what they were passionate about instead of taking whatever job they could find
which paid enough money to live. The people of the earth stopped fighting as
countries against one another, and countries eventually disappeared. Instead of
governments of countries on our planet, we joined a united federation of
planets as a united earth.
If
you haven't figure it out, or didn't already know, the man I'm talking about is
Gene Roddenberry, and this science fiction world he created was the basis for
the television show Star Trek.
Many
who believe mankind was divided into races by God, and are destined to always
fight against one another, might have a problem with this type of story. Others
who firmly believe the link between work and starvation is the only thing
stopping mankind from degenerating into worthless wastes of skin may also have
a problem with a story like this. I’d like to think we have a brighter future
than either of those things.
Star
Trek was the first setting where I heard of the concept of work as we know it
going away. Like most things in the Star Trek universe, I thought 1) much of it
sounded awesome, and 2) It sounded very far-fetched. The funny thing about this
is that since Star Trek first hit the television in 1966, more than a dozen
pieces of technology like technology in this show have actually been invented.
This includes automatic doors, tablet computers, voice-activated computers,
GPS, bionic eyes for the blind, teleconferencing, real-time, vocal translators,
and more. Is it possible that the amount of people working to feed and clothe
all of mankind could be reduced to a small enough group of people that most
people could choose their vocation based on what they were good or what they
loved, instead of taking a job they hate, out of fear that they might otherwise
starve or freeze to death?
Of
course, this process has been in motion for decades. When America was founded,
the overwhelming majority of jobs were agriculture-based.
The
US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that as of 2016, only 3% of the US workforce
has jobs in the agriculture sector. That includes, forestry, fishing, and hunting,
wage and salary as well as self-employed. So even though Americans may still
have to work to eat, 97% of us do not help produce food, lumber for
housing, nor plant material for clothing. source
Only
8% of Americans work in manufacturing, (source) but it looks like
less than 1% of that is in apparel manufacturing source
Another
trend, at the heart of the reality prompting this blog entry, is that even
though US manufacturing jobs have disappeared, output from our US factories has
actually grown at the same time. source
Similar
dynamics are occurring everywhere right now. Less people are needed by the big
companies of the world to produce more output and make those companies even more
money.
I
think it’s great that less human labor is needed to feed and clothe every
person in the world, due to advances in farming and manufacturing. Since the
turn of the century, we have seen similar trends even in the white-collar
world, where less and less people are needed to do the paperwork of and manage
more and more people and things.
The
good news is that many of the things we love in life end up costing less, since
the company producing them must pay less to make them. What's the bad news? The
bad news is this trend where the people with the money, the people who own the
farms and the factories and all the companies in general, need you and I less
and less as time goes on. Why do we care? We care because most of us are either
not independently wealthy, or we have children who are not independently
wealthy, or both. So most of us still count on jobs to provide ourselves and
our family with food, shelter, and clothing, and for paying for an education, so
we can have more of a choice over which jobs to take or create, and so the jobs
we are offered or create are higher-paying jobs, giving us more freedom to
choose what we want to do with our time.
We
may never get rid of money like they did in Star Trek because we like the idea
of owning things, and as long as we own things, there will be money of one kind
or another.
The
ugly reality that impossible to keep ignoring forever is that most, of the jobs
now in existence could go away in the historically near future, due to advances
in robotics and artificial intelligence. Conventional thinking would suggest
that if this happens, huge portions, or even most people may not have work to
perform, nor a way to support themselves. Trends in employment during my
lifetime (born in 1972) have included less job security and the rise of the
"gig economy," as less companies want the burden of employees (yet
they still need people to do the work that lets their companies function). I
can only see these trends increasing as AI and automation continue to eliminate
human job positions.
You
may say that overall growth still out-paces losses to automation and AI, and I
think you would probably be right. At any point in history, we have been able
to assume that there will be more total jobs tomorrow than there are today,
because of growing populations, growing markets, and new markets invented as
new products are invented. All of this has depended on a healthy, or at least a
growing middle class. But the middle class has been reduced over the past few
decades by the employment trends I named in the previous paragraph. Lack of consumer
sector growth is just one non-ideological reason that a growing wealth
disparity is a bad thing.
Regardless
of your ideology, how much longer can the business world in general continue to
make long-term plans based in continued overall growth across all markets? We
have seen certain sectors' growth plateau in developed countries. One example
of this is Coca-Cola. As much of a workhorse as that company was for the US
economy for so many decades, their only growth market today is in developing
countries. I believe the Coca Cola company was in fact recently bought by a
Mexican-owned company. Does the developed world collectively even desire
to contribute in this or similar ways to the developing world's potential
childhood obesity epidemic, if they follow in our footsteps of soft drink
addiction for all? If our continued ability to make money depends on each of
the developing countries building their respective markets to anywhere near the
strength of the current US market, we will undoubtedly need to continue to
innovate as we will undoubtedly deplete the earth of certain important
minerals, rare earths, clean air, etc.
Even
if you don’t think automation will take your job in your lifetime or your kids’
lifetime, so many US positions are nonetheless affected by outsourcing of work
overseas. And if one focuses only on protecting US jobs with stiff laws, this
will even more and more money to be poured into automation research.
As
widespread automation increases its effect of making larger groups of people
unemployable for anything over a subsistence-level wage, many people with
conservative leanings will see the majority of people being on a type of
welfare as a great evil. Both conservative-minded and liberal-minded people
know that human beings need a way to feel valued in society, for their own
mental health, and right now (right or wrong), pay is largely how many people
quantify their value in society. What will we will do about this. I am not
aware of anyone of any ideology who looks forward to a society where people
literally don't have any work to do, regardless of whether it results in starvation
or not. Even in Star Trek, most Earth civilians I remember seeing were
anxiously engaged in work of some sort.
Whether
you are old-fashioned, and think idle hands are the work of the devil, or
forward-thinking, and concern yourself more with whether each person can find
his or her best and most creative place in the world, it seems we are headed
for further thinning of the middle-class herd, and a larger disparity of
wealth. Concern over wealth disparity should concern everyone, because it is
the doing away of with the American dream, it shuts down class mobility, it is
the perfect breeding ground for corruption, which eventually undermines law and
order, eventually forcing those in power to choose between anarchy and fascism.
So
when we get to the point where automation (including Artificial Intelligence)
has replaced the lion's share of jobs in the world what is everyone else in the
world going to do? I'm sure if it comes to that, there will be battles over
words, whether the unemployable, who are desperate enough for food that they
will take any job offered to them, are referred to as modern-day slaves or some
yet-to-be-invented word. Half of the voting population will want the government
to provide basic necessities for everyone, so that everyone has the opportunity
to become educated enough to find challenging work that they enjoy, and the
other half of the voting population will see a person's position in life
(determined by who they are born to) as divinely appointed (a back towards
feudalism).
Maybe
by the time the artificial intelligence of the world turns into SkyNet and
launches a war against mankind, it won't matter as much, since most of us will
have starved to death by then
