The End of Jobs

We've discussed what it means for the coming End of Jobs. Gradually, but accelerating, we are seeing more and more human jobs disappear as machines take over. What will replace jobs for humans? Vivek Wadhwa writes about the quandary in I Have Seen the Future and It Is Jobless : There won't be much work for human beings. Self-driving cars will be commercially available by the end of this decade and will eventually displace human drivers — just as automobiles displaced the horse and buggy — and will eliminate the jobs of taxi, bus, and truck drivers. Drones will take the jobs of postmen and delivery people. The debates of the next decade will be about whether we should allow human beings to drive at all on public roads. The pesky humans crash into each other, suffer from road rage, rush headlong into traffic jams, and need to be monitored by traffic police. Yes, we won't need traffic cops either. Robots are already replacing manufacturing workers... It will be like the future that Autodesk CEO Carl Bass once described to me: "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." How are policy-makers going to grapple with entire industries' disruptions in periods that are shorter than election cycles? The industrial age lasted a century, and its consequent changes have happened over generations. Now we have startups in Silicon Valley shaking up bedrock industries such as cable and broadcasting, hotels and transportation. The writing is clearly on the wall about what lies ahead. Yet even the most brilliant economists — and futurists — don't know what to do about it. In his debate with me, Kurzweil said: "Automation always eliminates more jobs than it creates if you only look at the circumstances narrowly surrounding the automation. That's what the Luddites saw in the early 19th century in the textile industry in England. The new jobs came from increased prosperity and new industries that were not seen." Kurzweil's key argument was that just as we could not predict the types of jobs that were created, we can't predict what is to come. Kurzweil is right, but the problem is that no matter what the jobs of the future are, they will surely require greater skill and education — robots can do all the grunt work. Manufacturers who want to bring production back already complain that they can't find enough skilled workers in the U.S. for their automated factories. Technology companies that write the software also complain about shortages of workers with the skills that they need. We won't be able to retrain the majority of the work force fast enough to take the new jobs in emerging industries. During the industrial revolution, it was the younger generations who were trained — not the older workers. At best we have another 10 to 15 years in which there is a role for humans. The number of available jobs will actually increase in the U.S. and Europe before it decreases. China is out of time because it has a manufacturing-based economy, and those jobs are already disappearing. Ironically, China is accelerating this demise by embracing robotics and 3D printing. As manufacturing comes back to the U.S., new factories need to be built, robots need to be programmed and new infrastructure needs to be developed. To install new hardware and software on existing cars to make them self-driving, we will need many new auto mechanics. We need to manufacture the new medical sensors, install increasingly efficient solar panels, and write new automation software. So the future is very bright for some countries in the short term, and in the long term is uncertain for all. The only certainty is that much change lies ahead that no one really knows how to prepare for. Wadhwa thinks we will shrink the work week to give everyone who wants a job a job. But, that kind of stopgap nonsense simply won't fly for long. Eventually, we will inevitably run into a limit. That limit is the day when all jobs for humans simply end because the machines can do better. We will need to transition to a jobless society. It's as simple—and radical—as that.

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