But what happens when the programs get smarter?
by David Atkins
This “refutation” on Vox of the job mechanization is simultaneously troubling and hilarious:
Will automation take your job away? No, argues economist David Autor in a new paper presented at the Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Friday. Instead, it’ll just push you into a menial low-wage job.
That, at least, has been the recent past of technology’s impact on the labor market, Autor suggests. We’ve seen what he calls “job polarization” where automation has increased the demand for highly skilled managers and creative types, plus the demand for low-paid food prep workers and such. He offers these two charts as evidence…
This chart shows that across a whole bunch of different European countries, we’ve seen high-wage jobs grow and low-wage jobs grow while middle-wage jobs shrink…
Autor says this more or less shows the importance of improving education. Someone who might once have been qualified for a pretty good secretarial job is nowadays only going to be qualified for a job at Chipotle, since modern technology reduces the need for secretaries. To save her from the dismal future of a burrito stomping on a human face forever, she needs to be trained up to the level where she can get a job as an app developer or devising burrito marketing campaigns.
OK, that may be true. Temporarily. But that’s a little short-sighted, and a failure to recognize that technology isn’t limited to taking middle-class jobs whatever they may be. It’s just that middle-class jobs are the only ones that technology is currently equipped to take.
Blue-collar jobs have already been decimated by technology, and even the Chipotle burrito-rolling example used by the author isn’t safe: if our lattes are being poured and our burritos rolled by humans in 20 years, it won’t be because there aren’t machines fully equipped to do those jobs better than humans, but because we as customers might get creeped out by it. But I wouldn’t count on that.
More importantly, the author assumes that creative jobs will be protected from technological advance. Think again. Right now creative marketing is seen as a combination guesswork and genius, and folks like Malcolm Gladwell will point to examples of brilliant campaigns that caught fire due to human intuition and creatvity. Less noticed are the thousands of campaigns that simply fall flat, but people get paid lots of money to produce regardless.
Eventually it’s going to be simple for a combination of basic marketing research and big data algorithms to go through every campaign for a similar product and turn out very functional and effective campaigns without the need for a bunch of big ad agency money. And the same goes for most other creative work.
Moreover, the trend will eventually flatten the value of creative work. If everyone becomes an app developer, suddenly the value of app development plummets. Today’s “app developer” is yesterday’s “web designer.”
The programs are going to keep getting smarter. High-paying jobs are already being hurt by the internet-enabled flattening and by automation, and more and more industries are being flattened.
Pushing more STEM education simply puts a few more rats higher up on the mast of a sinking ship. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
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