Hello everyone, I am terrified. It is the month of October and so far the scariest thing I have dealt with is the looming spectre of mass automation in the workforce. To the uninitiated it can seem like a daunting challenge. I don’t want to go and say I know a lot about the state of automation, because I only started reading about it seriously recently. And sure, there are some good things that could come from automation taking up the boring, monotonous, banal jobs. Unfortunately automation is a much bigger subject than just one person with a blog could try and tackle, much to the chagrin of anyone on Medium.
We can pretty accurately predict which jobs are going to become automated in the near future, which could give some people time to adjust before that happens. Here is an article by Upstack which covers which areas are likely to be automated and why. These are all relatively simple, repetitive jobs which can be coded. The jobs that are less likely to be automated are the more complex, nuanced, intuitive jobs. Those are also a lot harder to train for than the jobs which are being replaced. These more difficult jobs can in theory, be more fulfilling for people to flex their creative problem solving skills and do complicated work. In one of the brighter articles I read, Tannya D. Jajal of Awecademy argues that this new era of automation will lead to a rise in Meaningful Work. Jajal argues, based off of Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity is Near,” that people will no longer be reliant on menial labor to get through life. They can change careers into something more fulfilling to themselves and everything will be better. What isn’t given in the article are any stats about how that will happen.
The bleakest article in contrast, author Scott Santens suggests that we will hit a point where there will be far more people than jobs available due to automation. Santens backs up his ideas by showing trends in industries such as oil, where there was a major decline forcing oil companies to upgrade their rigs. This left a huge gap in their workforce that they didn’t need to hire back, even after they had recovered. He touts the figure that 220,000 jobs may have been lost forever. Will complex, meaningful work be able to replace that many jobs? I don’t know. I DO know that Santens shows his hand towards the end, by putting out the idea of Universal Basic Income. Personally I don’t want to get into that can of worms, but it could easily be why he makes such a Nostrademian prediction toward automation. He uses it as a platform to push the idea of UBI because so many people will be out of work. That could clearly point to him not wanting to include or easily overlooking job growth in order to make his point.
All in all, automation can be a scary idea. Permanent job loss can become a major problem if we let it. However Santens does make the point that, as of 2017, the conversation regarding automation had just started gaining leverage. Now we are more conscious about it, not completely but it is growing. I want to leave you with a bright idea before I go. The last article I read this week spoke about how automation, in conjunction with people, can make education and learning more efficient. In the article by Rebecca Sealfon, she talks about all of the simple menial stuff teachers have to do to run a classroom. You might be familiar with Scantron sheets to help grade tests faster, but theres more that can be done. Sealfon offers suggestions which could then allow the teacher to spend more time with the students, nurturing their sense of learning.
Well what do you think, are we doomed? Am I overreacting (someone on the internet overreacting, whaaat)? Is there a reason I shouldn’t be scared? Let me know, I’m excited to hear about it.