Work-Related Technology: What’s Been Happening, and a Good Question About It

For something progressing since Willy Loman’s 1940s admonition to his son that he shouldn’t do anything menial when in one, since “they have office boys,” improvement this century so far, except for things involving telephones, has been lethargic.  Will it stay that way?

For the first potential exception we have a labor-replacer, “Biometric Payments Are Replacing Cash and Card at Grocery Stores” (Neil Campbell, Vision Times, June 10-16).  The month before, “Mastercard announced its Biometric Checkout Program,” which allows people, possibly laden with purchases, to authorize payments with “a quick smile or wave.”  As of press time, the service was only used in a Sao Paulo grocery chain, but something related has been in place in China for five years or more.  I see no reason why it couldn’t work throughout this country as well.

A sort of old laggard, long promising to employ more specialized technicians and far fewer line workers, may be getting new life, as shown in “3-D Printing Grows Beyond Its Novelty Roots” (Steve Lohr, The New York Times, July 3^rd).  I see no leaps and bounds here, and we knew that “we have proven the technology works” – that is its strongest point, though one leavened by it being “too slow, too expensive, and too ridden with defects” – but other steady, revenue generating applications beyond the “specialized parts” that have barely justified it are reasonable enough for one company, VulcanForms, to have “six giant 3-D printers” with expectations for 20 more in 2023.  The technology still lacks its big purpose – until it gets one that works and fulfills high demand in practice, 3-D printing must be considered only a niche service.

The title of Kate Dwyer’s August 19^th New York Times piece may have been “Don’t Worry, We’re Not Actually Monitoring Your Productivity,” but its subject is nothing new – I experienced that as a late-1980s data entry clerk in a shop that didn’t even have personal computers.  This article was about a simulation of an unnamed program that harassed workers with laughably short-term progress assessments.  As I have written before, that sort of thing is fertile soil for growing unions.

Now we know that at least one chief executive officer has read science fiction!  “Entirely robot-run, Mezli launches its first ‘fully autonomous’ restaurant in California” (Kristen Altus, Fox Business, September 2^nd) seems overdue if anything, but is actually in business in San Francisco’s Mission Bay area – you can go there and order “Mediterranean-style bowls,” with detail requests quantified into “more than 60,000 menu combinations,” and no human will touch them until “customers retrieve their food from a smart locker.”  This store, less expensive to build as well as to operate, does, for now, have people on locations to handle complaints, but even those will be replaced by “email and phone contact.”  There are nontechnical issues here, such as potentially reliving the failure of mid-century automats to last, but this company and the rest of us will learn a lot from this experience.  I say such restaurants, helped by their smaller footprints, will get at least a significant long-term niche. 

Another reminder from my corporate past arrived in a previous New York Times piece from Steve Lohr, “Why Isn’t New Technology Making Us More Productive?” (May 24^th).  In the mid-1990s, managements were high on Internet connections, but they were then mainly for games and pornography – the user interfaces, reliability, and speed had not yet arrived.  Among Lohr’s general principles, a “vital ingredient” in building economies is “a nation’s skill in creating and commercializing innovation, which makes investment and workers more productive.”  After a remarkably standstill 20 years, we may be improving by, for example, using artificial intelligence to assist instead of replace help-desk personnel.  We also needed the reminder that simply creating advancements hardly means that they will be implemented and durable, especially valuable since our problems are almost always after that – see, for example, our experience with driverless cars.  It may turn out that many improvements will have to sneak in through the back door of incremental changes – but if they get there, we will, eventually, benefit.  And that’s what matters.