The history and future of work

This has been on my mind for a couple of years. Automation is accelerating in such a manner that there is less and less work for human beings to do. Yet we expect most adults to work for a living. As the work goes away, what happens to the living?

This concern has been growing steadily but without any sign of a policy response, at least in the U.S. I visited a Roman Catholic friend this weekend and was shown a copy of the national Catholic magazine, America; the cover story was "Life without work: Will we be ready?" I was surprised.

The article cites a 2013 estimate that about 47 percent of the workforce holds jobs that are at a high risk of elimination due to automation. We are already seeing the end of the era where mechanization caused a simplification of job tasks — think of assembly lines. Even accounting clerks, proofreaders, and other white-collar jobs are highly endangered.

While computerisation has been historically confined to routine tasks involving explicit rule-based activities, algorithms for big data are now rapidly entering domains reliant upon pattern recognition and can readily substitute for labour in a wide range of non-routine cognitive tasks. In addition, advanced robots are gaining enhanced senses and dexterity, allowing them to perform a broader scope of manual tasks.…

Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk.… More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades, are highly susceptible to computerisation.…

While nineteenth century manufacturing technologies largely substituted for skilled labour through the simplification of tasks, the Computer Revolution of the twentieth century caused a hollowing-out of middle-income jobs.…

— Carl Benedikt Frey & Michael Osborne

Automation is leaving behind jobs that have a high creative and social component. But we haven't been doing a good job of educating people for this kind of work, especially in the U.S. And nothing is simpler than "offshoring" much of this work, often with a gain in efficiency as coders, attorneys, and engineers in South Asia churn through tasks while we in the Western Hemisphere are sleeping. No wonder we are already seeing younger people with brand-new college degrees stringing together temporary jobs (or "gigs") rather than building traditional full-time careers.

How about some historical perspective on this change? Are we going back to earlier forms of making a living? Should we learn to grow our own food? As the value of our labor decreases, will slavery once again become the most common form of human resources management? Or will we divorce labor from livelihood, making everyone's lives freer and more abundant? (At least until the robots become sentient.…)

Some (fairly dry) readings:

• Frey & Osborne 2013: The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?
• 2014 Pew Center report: AI, robotics, and the future of jobs
• 2015 Educational Testing Service survey: America's skills challenge: Millennials and the future

I worry about this a lot. In good moments, I like to imagine that technology will create sufficient abundance that there will be enough for all, work will become optional, and people will be freed to follow pursuits of their own choosing.

Then there are the other moments. Not pretty. But I have long struggled against apocalyptic fears. I hope this is only that: fear.

I wonder about this what I wonder about global warming: will technology offer answers we don't currently have? I guess I shudder to think our future rests on collective human wisdom.

Where I live life without work has already become a reality for a majority of the people. And it isn't a nice reality.

I am reading Michael Harrington's Socialism past and Future and it seems this problem has been creeping up on us since Ford invented mass production, I would say since the Springfield Armory invented interchangeable parts. A consumer society depends on having consumers, duh, and Harrington argues that the first minimum wage laws were an attempt to assure a consumer base to support the economy. In 1989 Harrington was saying that technological advances would force an expansion of the welfare state as more goods were produced by fewer people.

I think Gene Roddenberry had the best vision of a work free future. We just need to get there.

>4 TLCrawford:

By contrast, a dystopian vision of that work-free, ostensibly secure future is The Machine Stops. E.M. Forster worried that a world without ambition and struggle would create a human species incapable of keeping the automation running as intended — incapable, in fact, of really living.

Postcapitalism by Paul Mason is worth a read, and also Abundance, by Peter Diamandis. There's no doubt in my mind that technology will not create more jobs than it destroys, and that a lot of the "work" that will be created will be unpaid work. The goal has to be to invent ways of redistributing the wealth created by technology that don't involve labor - a goal that the rich don't seem to be interested in, funnily enough. And that's despite the fact that the majority of rich people didn't get that way from working... Politicians don't seem to be even remotely near this page.

>5 Muscogulus: I have always wanted to write and i love doing research in libraries and archives. Would that be considered work? My wife is fascinated with making stained glass windows and one of her daughters paints murals. I have never been concerned that if I did not need a paycheck I would turn into a couch potato. In fact it has need my experience that putting in 9-11 hour days six, even just five days a week, is what has left me collapsed on the couch without a thought or ambition, other than sleep, in my head.

Our best estimate is that our prehistoric nomadic ancestors only spent about 2-3 hours a day hunting food. They were very creative and artistic and we have the artifacts and technology to prove it. I will admit that today we make better thread and better paints but they invented both and needed neither.

They were very creative and artistic and we have the artifacts and technology to prove it.

That's not entirely accurate. We have artistic and creative artifacts, and that proves some people were creative and artistic. We have tons more artifacts that are not particularly creative or artistic.

Regardless, I believe that people in general will do what they want to do if given the chance. That includes 'work' of all sorts.

Is it work if you enjoy doing it? Not to you, obviously; but others might find what you're doing tedious and dull, i.e. 'work'.

Also, I suspect some tasks will never be automated, but will still have to be performed. So, yes, in the future we will still work. But perhaps not as much.

Yes, but how much of the population will have such work, or be needed for such a job. And what of the rest?

9> The answer is yes, of course it's still work if you enjoy doing it. It's a sad fact that a great many of the jobs that have come into existence in the last few decades would be hard to enjoy. The hope is that when most of those jobs get automated or rendered unnecessary the occupations that replace them will be better. Probably many of them won't be what is normally understood to be "work". I've always believed that you work in order to live rather than live in order to work, but we need to break that nexus, so that you only need to work if you want to.