The evidence is compelling. Last year, two economists, Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, published a report on their research covering the period 1990-2007 and found that each industrial robot installed on an assembly line eliminated 6.2 human jobs. The New York Federal Reserve did a study of blue and white collar jobs and concluded that almost half – 47 percent – were in danger of being automated.
Despite the depth and range of these impending job losses, some economists argue that they are not a cause for alarm. The magic of “creative destruction” will inevitably kick in and give people a way to stay employed. It happened in the Industrial Age, they assert, so it’s sure to happen again in this new era. Electricity may have put candle makers on the breadline, but it simultaneously created tens of millions of new jobs that had never even existed before, and automaton, artificial intelligence and machine learning are certain to do the same. Just wait, they declare, the good times are coming.
And yet, the evidence before us completely contradicts that rosy view. For example, a Forrester Research study has found that robots will likely create 15 million new jobs in the U.S. over the next 10 years. That’s good news, to be sure, but it’s only half the picture. Forrester also predicts that those robots will simultaneously eliminate 25 million current positions. And, it doesn’t take a super computer to determine who comes out on the short end of that exchange.
Similarly, researchers at Oxford University used data from that earlier New York Federal Reserve study and came to the exact same conclusion it did. Almost half of the jobs in the 7800 occupations they examined (47 percent or 60 million jobs) were likely to be filled by machines. And no one – not a single scientist, economist or futurist – can say that those jobs will be replaced by an equal number of new jobs, let alone by even more jobs that pay the same or better than the ones that the super-C machines destroyed. Our experience to date with this technology simply does not support such a claim.
When the Trickle Slows to a Stop
In the new reality of this post-industrial, post-information, post-everything we’ve ever known era, creative destruction will be replaced by a new phenomenon: creative displacement. The number of new jobs created by each successive generation of technologically advanced machines will be so small as to effectively displace humans in the workplace.
Each robot that eliminates the jobs of 6.2 humans on the assembly line will contribute to the creation of some new jobs, but those positions will be few in number and highly specialized. They also won’t last very long. The arrival of the technological singularity – the point in time when machines become smarter than humans – will add machine cognition to that of humans and so accelerate the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning that Moore’s Law will seem like a horse and buggy pace of progress. When will that happen? Scientists, academicians and futurists say it’s likely to be 2040, and the net effect will be dramatic and dispiriting. As fast as new jobs for humans are created, they will be lost to yet another generation of super-C machines.
The wheels of capitalism will spin even faster as the technological singularity removes the last human friction from research and development – their limited intelligence. Since machine developers sell their products as a way to reduce an organization’s costs and improve its productivity, they will seek to gain a market advantage by leveraging machine intelligence to accelerate the introduction of one new generation after another of even more capable machines that can replace even more of those high cost and inefficient human workers. Each new generation of machines may also create some jobs for humans, but once again their number will be fewer than the jobs that are destroyed, and the life expectancy of those new jobs will be even shorter still. Like an existential metronome, this cycle will repeat itself over and over again until there’s nothing left for humans to do. The law of creative displacement will have reached its ultimate and inevitable conclusion.
What should you do in the face of such a looming crisis? The first step is to avoid being caught off guard. Build situational awareness. Make it your responsibility – for yourself and for your family – to know what technology is doing to the jobs in your profession, craft or trade and to the industry in which you work. You don’t have to be a systems analyst or programmer, just someone who pays attention to what machines are doing today, tomorrow and into the future.