No reason to fear rise of the machines
When it comes to the future of work, nothing inspires more fear or fascination than the idea that robots could supplant humans. Yet whenever I hear people fret about machines taking our jobs, I think of Mr Set Sar from Rhode Island, and I wonder if we are worrying about the right thing.
When it comes to the future of work, nothing inspires more fear or fascination than the idea that robots could supplant humans. Yet whenever I hear people fret about machines taking our jobs, I think of Mr Set Sar from Rhode Island, and I wonder if we are worrying about the right thing.
Mr Sar, who I interviewed last year, works in a warehouse where his every movement is dictated by a computer called the “Jennifer unit”, which talks to him through an earpiece and tells him where to go and what to do when he gets there. The pressure to “make rate” — to meet productivity targets — is so intense that when a colleague in his previous job dropped some tomatoes, the warehouse workers just trampled through them because they could not slow down for long enough to clear them up.
Cheap humans
We are so fixated by the threat of human-like machines that we have failed to notice the spread of machine-like humans.
I once met a sales executive at a company that made “voice-directed applications” for warehouse workers. His pitch: When people are picking 200 items an hour, even tiny improvements in their speed, such as not having to glance down at a handheld computer for the next instruction, accumulate into substantial gains.
The voice software reduces training time and errors by giving workers “step-at-a-time” instructions. So if your task is to pick 20 identical items from a shelf, the voice in your ear will first send you to the shelf, then tell you to pick five, then tell you to pick five more, and so on.
If you are going to make the work this robotic, why not use actual robots? Some warehouses do but the sales executive explained that humans are still better than machines at picking up differently sized objects. Plus, robots are expensive and they pay off slowly in an economy that might change quickly. People are flexible and cheap.
In fact, the relative cheapness of human labour is one explanation that economists offer for the recent slowdown in global productivity growth. For all the talk of mass automation, the trend is conspicuously absent from the hard productivity data.
Globally, growth in output per worker — the goods and services produced for every worker — decelerated in 2014 to 2.1 per cent, from an average 2.6 per cent a year between 1999 and 2006.
Of course, technology is reshaping the labour market all the time, but so far it has mostly eroded jobs in the middle of the skill spectrum. It has made less of a dent in low-paid, labour-intensive sectors where widespread automation would lead to big productivity gains. Tools such as the “Jennifer unit” may be squeezing incremental efficiencies out of people but they are not replacing them.
Some economists think the recession, combined with a glut of labour brought on by globalisation and population growth, has helped to make workers so plentiful and affordable that companies have not needed labour-saving breakthroughs.
As Mr Toby Nangle, an asset manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, says, why would you invest in a machine to do the work of 1,000 people, when it is cheaper just to employ 1,000 people?
Losing jobs to automation
This might not last. Labour markets are tightening, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Amazon, which bought a robot company a few years ago, reportedly found it more expensive last year to hire its 100,000 Christmas temporary workers.
Global demographic trends are also turning as countries including China begin to age. At the same time, policymakers across the developed world are starting to force up minimum wages.
Meanwhile, technology is becoming better and cheaper. Mr Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, said recently that up to 15 million jobs in Britain were at risk of automation, with the lowest-paid becoming the most exposed.
That would be traumatic and many of those jobs would be sorely missed. But not all would be worth mourning, unless what replaced them was mass unemployment and eye-watering inequality.
That is one possible outcome but it is not the only one. In every other wave of technological change in human history, new jobs have arisen as old ones disappeared, some of them unimaginable even a few years earlier.
It would not be easy or smooth but a fresh wave of automation would at least give us the opportunity to leave the robotic jobs to the robots, and find more fulfilling work for humans to do. THE FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sarah O’Connor is the Financial Times’ employment correspondent and a new weekly columnist.