Fears of automation’s threat to human employment may be overblown.
What’s Inside?
The author considers three analyses of whether the longstanding fear of automation’s ruinous effect on jobs is justifiable. The arguments are complicated, and the debate is unsettled.
How Is This Article Useful to Practitioners?
The specter of automation’s impact on the work force is an enduring one. From the Luddites’ objection to new technology that would replace hand-loom weaving during the Industrial Revolution to worries in the early 1960s about rapid agricultural automation to fears regarding information technology advances today, concerns about jobs’ vulnerability to automation have waxed and waned.
Three researchers recently published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives examine the validity of such worries. As to the fear that more efficient robotics would replace labor on a large scale, one researcher contends that more efficient machinery has actually created new jobs, giving the examples of the increase in US employment during the 20th century’s technological advances and the fact that the massive decline in agricultural employment has not caused widespread unemployment. For example, the rise of automated teller machines has created opportunities for employees to assist bank clients with other products and services and created a need for more employees in the process.
Another researcher considers the revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, aspect of artificial intelligence. Cloud robotics and deep learning could enhance communication between robots and result in a greater ability to process data and expand skills. Add to this the expedients of the increased availability and capacity of wireless internet access, data storage, and computing power, and the effect could be a much greater role for automation. Exponentially faster and further-reaching capabilities could mean a much greater share of displaced workers. Yet the ability to predict what jobs in the future will look like is quite difficult, as the third researcher argues.
The extent to which technology may replace jobs is a matter of the job function in question—for example, cognitive versus manual and routine versus nonroutine. Cognitive and routine work, common in administration and middle management, has been at the most risk. Cognitive and nonroutine work, by contrast, benefits from the greater efficiencies that technological advances bring.
Although the threat of automation is real, it cannot readily substitute for the mixture of skill, flexibility, and judgment. Policymakers’ concerns about the social costs of automation may serve to limit its reach as well.
Abstractor’s Viewpoint
Automation may well put some part of the work force in jeopardy. Three different analyses consider how far reaching this effect may be. The notion of creative destruction seems to have a valid place in arguments supporting greater use of automation because the process could be a job creator rather than destroyer. The debate carries important public policy implications and seems to be ongoing.