How will the progress of IT and automation change the working world?
In 1988, Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff predicted that the working world was on the verge of a revolution in which many jobs would be “informated”–automated and computerized in ways that would greatly extend human capacities even as it dumbs-down the level of skill required to perform tasks.
Ahead of her time in many ways (Zuboff was one of the first tenured women at HBS), her thoughts on automation were prescient in many ways. Today, however, the picture of the future Zuboff painted in the book In the Age of Smart Machines: the Future of Work and Power, seems conservative, even quaint. Robots have taken over operating theaters and are performing complex surgeries with precision. In over 6 million households, Roombas – automatic vacuum sweepers – have replaced the cleaning woman. In some places, robots are letting people attend meetings and oversee the work of subordinates a world away. Many factories are entirely automated.
And it’s not over yet: some futurists claim that within 20 years, computers will be smarter than we are in every respect. Relatively soon, they say, the routine work that has always kept humanity occupied will be on its way out, creating a world of new risk and new promise – and nowhere more acutely than in dynamic economies such as China.
As more and more work is automated and even some traditional professions face mechanization – IBM, for instance, is now working with John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, on a voice-activated physician’s assistant – futurist Martin Ford envisages a world where the robots will take over three-fourths of all human labor.
A Californian software company owner who has seen his own business become more automated over the last 20 years, Ford has become increasingly convinced that smart machines could undermine the entire global economic structure. In his book, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, Ford argues that because the world’s economy depends ultimately on consumption, a lack of work will eventually cut many people out of the economy.
Just as agriculture in most developed countries is now almost entirely mechanized, other kinds of production are becoming increasingly automatic. In the factories, products are “getting smaller and smaller, they’re miniaturizing, and it’s pretty clear that these things are so miniature and so precise that there just isn’t a place for human beings anymore,” he says. “…it’s getting to the point where people simply can’t keep up.”
In the past, this has always been okay for workers in the end: more work for the machines has meant cheaper goods and services for everyone. But Ford argues that this time it’s different.
End of the Routine
“Historically, people have transitioned from one type of routine work to the next type of routine work,” Ford says. They went from the farm to the factory, then from the factory to the office or the store.
But that’s not going to happen now, he says, because routine work itself is going away.
Certainly from the view of an American software developer, it’s easy to make the case. In the US, for instance, classified newspaper advertising, an advertising medium that once employed tens of thousands of people, has been replaced over the past decade by the Internet, principally job search site Monster.com, the eBay auction site, and most impressively, Craigslist – which is said to employ only 30 people or so. The financial world too is increasingly automated: approximately 70% of US stocks are bought and sold in a transaction that involves no human being either buying or selling.
During this period, productivity has climbed at an annual rate of 2.8% a year since 1995, according to US government statistics. However, although many American companies are in excellent financial shape and more profitable than ever, wages have stayed flat except at the very top. Indeed, the popularity of the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement – “We are the 99%” – suggests that even the general public is now aware of this trend.
As society divides between a few machine-masters and the rest of humanity Ford argues that massive unemployment is now inevitable. And with no way to pay for anything, even cheaper goods and services will be out of reach.
Dog’s Best Friend
[This article has been reproduced with permission from CKGSB Knowledge, the online research journal of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), China's leading independent business school. For more articles on China business strategy, please visit CKGSB Knowledge.]