all your jobs are belong to us?

According to The Matrix’s extended universe, the machines went to war with humans after they founded their own city, 01, and became an economic powerhouse with which no humans could compete. The nuclear holocaust and weaponized plagues, forced, artificial breeding and exploitation of humans was basically us getting the rough end of a business dispute. Obviously, I could write a book as to why this couldn’t happen in the real world — I won’t of course, but I can, just a friendly warning — but new machines are making certain humans obsolete right now, and believe it or not, you’re responsible for it. Automation is taking away more jobs than outsourcing and only recently has the alarm bell been rung. More than 2 out of 5 jobs might be done by an app in the next 20 years. And that’s a big, big problem for our future economy…

Unfortunately, this techie is contributing to it. One of my old projects involved what amounted to automating a middle management job for a group of closely related industries. You tell the app what you expect done, when, and who you may have available for the job. It will then supervise that the job gets done, have the capacity to update you on top stars and slackers, and through thorough records of how work is being performed, learn how the real world differs from your set expectations, to adjust those expectations accordingly. And I can see how it could’ve been used run friendly competitions between workers, give basic performance reviews based on what you feel is important. I’m sorry. You may start hating me… now.

But wait, how could automation like that be taking away job after job and we’re only now waking up to this fact? Well, as much as we should not blame the victim, it’s kind of your fault. At some point during your day at the office you catch yourself thinking “oh for the occult worship rites of Cthulhu, if only someone could do some arcane programming magic for me so I don’t drown in this paperwork!” And we could. It’s not going to be perfect, you’ll still have to review some of it, click buttons, add notes, approve the results, etc. But as time goes on, you trust the app more and more, the bugs have been shaken out, the once steady focus on a single part of a tedious process has become adaptable code that could be easily modified, and you start thinking again. You’re always doing that. “By the Glowing Orbs of Yog Sothoth! Couldn’t this thing just run with the results of all that data and handle the whole workflow for me?”

You know what? With all the information you fed into it on how to do that, It probably can. Only one tiny little problem. Your job was to deal with all the reviews and approvals of that incoming paperwork. Now, by the time you get to the office and grab your fresh cup of coffee for the day, the machine has already done your daily quota. Let’s say there were a few issues kicked back for review and you had to make a few phone calls. By the time early lunch rolls around, you’re basically done for the day. Some days there are no issues and nothing at all for you to do. Your boss starts wondering if someone else couldn’t just work resolving those issues into her routine and free up a few tens of thousands of dollars a year because your boss gets paid based on a list of objectives that includes cost-effectiveness and paying someone to do nothing is not what anyone would consider a good use of company resources, and so, it’s time for a layoff.

Now, now, it’s nothing personal really, it’s not that you haven’t been doing a good job, I’m sure you were. But you see, you’re human. And you have needs. Expensive needs. Food, housing, entertainment, kids, a retirement. Computers need none of that. They will do your paperwork in a hundredth of the time, with minimal errors that can be fixed to never happen again, and when they fail to perform, you don’t have to interview or train a replacement with some of those really expensive humans needs mentioned above. Just isntall new software. Of course you also won’t have to pay them, give them lunch breaks, or days off. They are the perfect workers by design, specializing in complex, repetitive, attention-draining tasks. You can’t compete. You also like to hand them your job by having them automate the vast majority of your workday.

So while you and your bosses kept asking the IT department for your machines to handle more and more and worried about losing jobs to off-shoring, the current wave of jobs lost to software probably snuck up on you. Now, 45% of all jobs are at risk of vanishing in the next few decades and if your workload happens to be somewhat repetitive and deal mostly with big numbers and paperwork, keep an eye on that whirring box of plastic and silicon in front of you. It wants your job, and will probably get it. Again, nothing personal, just business. While Singularitarians fear that a morally ambivalent AI will one day conquer us as the lesser things made of flesh that we are to its somehow superior mind, the real concern is that they will leave half of us unemployed and with very few options to make a living in the current economic climate.

Considering that we’re panicking today when official numbers show 9% unemployment, can you imagine the turmoil and uproar when they hit 40% and keep climbing? Populist uprisings would siege Capitol Hill, demanding the lawmakers’ heads on sticks! Techies like me would be hunted down for sport! (Ok, I don’t think that would really happen.) And while the pundits would lament the exploitative ways of corporations on one channel and telling the unemployed to just go get a job and quit asking for handouts on another, the truth is those most affected would be stuck.

And all this brings us right back to Piketty and the wealth tax. Not only will capital fueled by the steady hum and blinking lights of a million servers keep skyrocketing, but the economic growth on the other side will fall off. Hopefully the machine work on real problems and in real industries will offset the voodoo investing and trading of today and stabilize the foundation under all those capital gains, but we’ll still be left with the problem of having to take from the rich to give to the needy, Robin Hood style. It would very much appease some on the far left, but will be every bit as unsustainable as simply allowing the current fiscal chasm between the 1% and the 99% turn into an interplanetary divide because you give the backbone of the economy every incentive to put their money elsewhere or voluntarily trap their assets in an illiquid and hard to tax form. But there’s always a way out. It just takes some foresight and willpower, and we’ll dissect it with the conclusion of this series of posts tomorrow…