What is the future of work?

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