Work in the Age of Robots
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Work in the Age of Robots - Mark P. Mills
Who will invent America’s next great century?
The big ideas that will revolutionize the way we live will not emerge from our nation’s capital. They will be dreamt up, as they always have been, by enterprising Americans who hope to create positive value for others.
Encounter Intelligence is dedicated to promoting advances in innovation, education, and technology that will improve the lives of all Americans and unlock real opportunity for those who need it most.
Table of Contents
Grand transitions in productivity are episodic and powerful
Technology is the only leverage we’ve ever had to buy
time
We’re in a productivity deficit
Productivity growth solves a lot of problems
Productivity and employment have grown together for 130 years
Amara’s Law helps us imagine the future
Taxonomy for automation: Code in the Cloud and code in the cobot
America has always been service-dominated, but manufacturing remains critical
The post-industrial myth for manufacturing jobs
Blue-collar bots
Manufacturing 2.0
The coming robotification of services
Better labor productivity can bring down soaring healthcare costs
Data: The fuel for boosting service-sector productivity
The hyperscale data infrastructure and ubiquitous productivity
Ubiquitous data and ambient computing lead to the third information era
Software, productivity and jobs grow together
STEM employment is growing fast, but most jobs won’t be STEM ones
Long booms, and challenging disruptions, follow great infrastructure shifts
Copyright
Economists agree: The single biggest threat to future job growth in the United States is the surge of artificial intelligence. Gallup, January 2018
America is finally approaching full employment. But a chorus of experts claims that this happy situation will be short-lived. Their warning is not the usual one about unemployment rising again when the next recession hits. Instead, the proposition is more ominous: that technology is finally able to replace people in most jobs.
The idea that we face a future without work for a widening swath of the citizenry is animated by the astonishing power of algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, especially in the form of robots. At last count, more than a dozen expert studies, each sparking a flurry of media attention, have offered essentially the same conclusion: that the amazing power of emerging technologies today really is different from anything we’ve seen before; that is, the coming advances in labor productivity will be so effective as to eliminate most labor.
It has become fashionable in Silicon Valley to believe that, in the near future, those with jobs will comprise a minority of knowledge workers.
This school of thought proposes carving off some of the wealth surplus generated by our digital overlords to support a Universal Basic Income for the inessential and unemployable, who can then engage in whatever pastime their heart desires, except working for a wage.
It is true that something unprecedented is happening. America is in the early days of a structural revolution in technology, one that will culminate in an entirely new kind of infrastructure, one that democratizes AI in all its forms. This essay focuses on the factual and deductive problems with the associated end-of-jobs claim. In it, we explore what recent history and the data reveal about the nature of AI and robots, and how those technologies might impact work in the 21st century.
But before mapping out the technological shift now underway and its future implications, let’s look for context at previous revolutions in labor productivity.
Grand transitions in productivity are episodic and powerful
One of humanity’s oldest pursuits is inventing machines that reduce the labor-hours needed to perform tasks. History offers hundreds of examples. Each invention seemed amazing in its era. To note a handful of examples, in modern times, we have seen the arrival of the automatic washing machine in the 1920s; the programmable logic controller (PLC), which enabled the first era of manufacturing automation in 1968; the word processor in 1976; and the first computer spreadsheet in 1979.