It’s been quiet. The
American work situation, except for conservatives emphasizing its bad aspects to
carp about Obama and liberals trying to use its good side to push a minimum
wage higher than latent demand for employment can justify, has just about dropped
out of the press. There haven’t been
many reports of automation-related work losses.
However, we've been seeing technology-progress accounts that effectively
predict them.
One was published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal.
Titled “These Robots Serve Up Cocktails, but Can They Tell if You’ve
Drunk Too Much,” it gives the status of something I predicted two years ago, in
Choosing a Lasting Career, when I
gave bartenders poorer prospects than other food service jobs, pointing out
that automated drink mixing and serving would not only save labor but reduce
legal liability, and that a “thoroughly automated bar” would be around long
before the book’s 2033 horizon. In the
article, we learn about a variety of these cocktail robots (an already
established name), and how they are being developed to be more interesting than
just generic machines, with one a “rocket-shaped device with a large red start
button that releases steam,” another with flashing lights, and one more with
“plastic crystals and a fake flame.”
Giving them entertainment-machine bells and whistles may help with
customer acceptance, a potential problem I noted before, and they are already
in use for customer-facing applications on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, along
with, no doubt, large numbers of service bars.
The story makes clear that cocktail robots figure to proliferate, and
replace many jobs.
A second article came out Thursday, in the Detroit Free Press. It was a note on one area on which has
strengthened since 2013, self-driving cars.
That year I gave taxi drivers and chauffeurs Very Good prospects for
lasting 20 years, and said they had a “low automation threat.” The story described discussion opening the
Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress, in which a panel speaker, and
prominent industry figure, talked about the need to reduce the one million-plus
people dying annually, worldwide, due to car crashes caused by driver error. The software for self-driving cars has been
in development for over a year now, and although perfecting it has been challenging,
another panelist said that laws, not technology, could ultimately hold back its
use. It is clear that driverless cars will
be ready, and demonstrably an improvement over human-operated ones, before the
decade is out, meaning that anyone who drives for a living may have his or her
livelihood imperiled sometime in the next one.
Third, there was a story on Sunday’s New York Times, “The Machines Are Coming,” by Zeynep Tufekci. It was not chosen for publication in the Times’s op-ed section by presenting the old
issue of automation costing jobs, but for its reminder that work replaced by
technology will not all be at or near the minimum-wage level. Despite its future-leaning title,
capabilities the article attributes to current
machines include diagnosing medical test results, emotion detection, making
hiring decisions, and providing accurate and spoken responses to people calling
help desks. There have already been many
cases of what we would call good jobs being swept away by automation, especially
in electronically-compatible areas of analysis that turn out to be completely
algorithmic, and evidently there will be many more.
These three articles show that further technology-caused job
losses are, if not with clear timetables, on the way. A major point Tufekci makes is that rising automation
takes away workers’ power, in ways such as facilitating employers to
“”optimize” worker schedules in a way that devastates ordinary lives.” That brings us a fourth piece from the past
week, a column by Robert Reich. Its title,
“America’s “flexible” economy is making worker’s lives hell,” published in Salon, nearly says it all, with its
contents describing how software helps companies determine when employees are
not needed – information some, such as Target and The Gap, now use to call off workers
only minutes before their starting times.
The idea of what Reich said could be called “just-in-time scheduling,”
“on-call staffing,” or “on-demand work” is nothing new – I experienced it,
along with many of my scheduled work times being cut short, in a restaurant job
30 years ago, but the practice now seems more widespread, and fits with the
ethics of the sharing economy in which income is irregular.
What we can learn from these articles is not that automation
will cost employment. We knew that
already. It is that, despite relatively
peaceful times on the number of jobs, technology, and our ways we are using it to
that end, are still marching along.