We won’t experience it. Whether we’re twenty-five or sixty-five, a white-collar office worker or a blue-collar laborer, we won’t be affected. At least, not most of us and certainly not to its fullest and most disruptive extent. But, those who follow after us – our future families – will. Those generations will be totally immersed in it. They will live with it, know nothing else but it, and be shaped forever by it. The arrival of a new era in the history of humankind. A redefinition of that most fundamental aspect of our lives – work.
This post-industrial, post-information, post-everything-we’ve-ever-known age will begin in the United States and then spread inexorably around the world. It will establish a new reality, marked by the ultimate technological step function: machines will become smarter than people. They will also be stronger and nimbler, and more durable and reliable, as well. They will even be more creative than their human creators and more inventive than those who invent their constituent technologies. Machines will, in short, be better than humans in everything humans do in the workplace. And that discontinuity will change the graph of employment in America and reshape the society which it supports.
In the space of just five generations, the human workforce will go from being coveted and acquired as “talent,” to being dismissed and discarded as irrelevant. Today’s so-called War for Talent will have come to an end, but with an unexpected outcome – machines will have emerged as the victors. Every job now performed by a human will be done instead by more capable algorithms and robots. One hundred years from now – circa 2118 and beyond – super strong and ultra-intelligent machines will end the employment of people.
Sounds like the stuff of science fiction movies and dystopian novels, doesn’t it?
And yet, smart robots and other forms of automation have already replaced huge numbers of human workers on the assembly line and the farm; in banks and law firms; at highway toll booths, airline ticket counters and urban parking lots; and in call centers, secretarial pools, printing plants and warehouses. Though this reality is often ignored, it’s no secret that machines are already elbowing humans out of a growing number of blue-collar and even white-collar jobs. In 100 years, that usurpation of the employed man and woman will have reached its inevitable conclusion. People will be unneeded and unwanted on-the-job.
Machines will plow the fields; manufacture consumer and industrial products; repair cars, trucks, planes and ships; cook the meals in fine restaurants and serve freshly grilled hamburgers in fast food chains. They will construct new homes and office buildings and repair underground water mains and electrical cables; they will mow the lawns in our parks and paint the stripes on the streets for our driverless city buses. They will police our neighborhoods, fight our fires, respond to our medical emergencies, and deliver what mail is still being sent through our postal system.1
Machines will even learn the niceties of human customer service and become the only sales associates found in stores, whether we’re shopping online or in local retail establishments. They will always be courteous, unfailingly helpful, and completely knowledgeable about whatever product or service catches our fancy. In fact, that transformation is already underway. A 2017 report by the accounting and consulting firm PwC predicts that machines will fill over 44 percent of all retail jobs by 2030.2 Less than ninety years after that, they will be ringing up sales in every store we visit.
Omnipresent data collection systems feeding deep stacks of ever more refined algorithms built into neural networks designed to mimic and outthink the human brain will also track our every movement, pause and inquiry online and simultaneously analyze that data to know exactly what we want or need, even before we realize it ourselves. They will answer our questions, make product and service suggestions, follow us around the web with ads for those products and services, and then take our online orders for anything we decide to buy. They will also package up our purchases in boxes made by other machines and deliver them in vehicles still other machines will drive or pilot. And then, still more machines will call our cellphones to make sure we received our order and were satisfied with the service. Automation and machine intelligence will have removed the human friction of irritability, forgetfulness, inattention and absenteeism from consumerism, and that engine of American capitalism won’t hum, it will silently roar.
Even more advanced systems – sentient androids specially designed to socialize and empathize with humans – will meet us at the door of our favorite restaurant and using facial recognition and our personal profiles stored in the cloud, greet us by name and show us to our favorite table. They will access our tastes in food and wine and make appropriate recommendations from the daily specials on the menu. They will chat with us about our kids whom they will know by name and age and even their favorite sport or hobby; they will deliver our meals the minute the chef-droid takes them off the stove; and they will wait while we take our first bite to make sure it’s been cooked comme il faut. And at the end of the evening, they will remind us that we have an anniversary coming up in three weeks and that there’s no need to leave a tip … they are well maintained by the establishment.
Similarly, Main Street clothing stores will install humanoids that can instantaneously remake themselves into a perfect replica of each customer they are helping. These look-alike droids will help select clothing items based on the customer’s prior buying record which will have been archived in the store’s database, model each item so the customer can see exactly how it would actually look on them (the reflection in a mirror being such a limited and outdated perspective) and finally suggest just the right accessory for each item. Once a selection is made, they will cheerfully ring up the sales using an internal computer – no more waiting on line at the cash register – and deliver a receipt via a wrist slot. From beginning to end, the experience will be so personal and pleasant, it will actually revive brick and mortar retail stores, branding them as an indulgent destination rather than as simply a place to buy clothes off-the-rack….
Some of our children and all of our grandchildren and great grandchildren will live in a jobless society. It doesn’t matter what kind of employment they might seek – blue-collar, white-collar, pink-collar, gray-collar, rainbow-collar, no-collar – by early in the next century, they will have been displaced and replaced by a machine. Yes, there will be exceptions: professional athletes, movie stars, and those who work in human-centric organizations, for example, will still have some form of traditional employment. But, they will be the exception to the Rule of Automation. For everyone else – for the vast, vast majority of the American workforce circa 2118 – machines will have terminated human employment.
That is the inescapable new reality coming to the American world of work. A change in the tax code won’t counter it. Investments in job creation won’t limit it. Government laws and regulations won’t stop it. And, sticking our heads in the sand won’t make it go away.
Which begs the question – the most important question we will face in our lifetime and our kids will face in theirs – what will our grandkids and great grandkids do? What work will be left for them to perform that machines can’t perform better? What will they have in their lives to challenge and fulfill them?
1. Kathleen Elkins, The 20 jobs that robots are most likely to take over, Business Insider, May 29, 2015.
2. Uwe Hennig, The rise of machines and AI in retail, ITProPortal, July 27, 2017.
Click here to get your copy of Circa 2118: What Humans Will Do When Machines Take Over