Ever since modern economic growth began 300 years ago, people have worried about the machines of the day taking destroying jobs. And yet time and time again, those worries have turned out to be misplaced. Why might this time be different? The short answer to that question is the systems and machines are just relentlessly becoming more capable. The tasks and activities we thought were out of their reach, are no longer.
Every day, we hear stories of systems and machines that are taking on tasks we thought, until recently, only human beings alone could ever do – making medical diagnoses, drafting legal contracts, designing beautiful buildings, writing news reports.
For a long time, people thought the only way to build a system or machine that can outperform a human being was to watch a human being perform a particular task or activity. And then try to capture that human reasoning in a set of instructions or rules for a machine to follow. But that has now changed.
Let me give you an example. A team of researchers at Stanford recently announced the development of a system that, if you give it a photo of a freckle, can tell you as accurately as leading dermatologists, whether or not that freckle was cancerous. It knows or understands nothing about medicine at all; it's not trying to follow the rules that a doctor follows. Instead, it's got a vast database of historical cases – 130,000 of them. And it's running essentially a pattern recognition algorithm, hunting for similarities between them and the particular photo. It is performing the task in a fundamentally different way to how a human would perform it.
What does all of this mean, for the vast majority of us for whom our job is our main source of income? I don't think we're taking seriously enough the threat of a world where there's not enough work for people to do because of these remarkable technological changes that are taking place.
I'm not saying that there's going to be some big, sudden technological bang in the next few years after which lots of people wake up and find themselves suddenly without a job. Work is going to remain for some time to come. But, as we move through the 21st century, more and more people will find themselves unable to make the sorts of economic contributions to society that they might have hoped or expected to make in the 20th century, and the pandemic has accelerated that trend.
The impact that technology is having on work is not just a white collar story, it's affecting the entire labour market. And it's not just about work either. It's also about its impact on society about how we all live together.
I think there are three fundamental challenges.
One is the challenge of inequality. This is very similar to the economic challenge that we face during this pandemic: how do we share our prosperity when our traditional way of doing so – paying people for the work that they do – isn't effective because so many people can't find work? We’ve seen the state step forward and take on a far larger role that many thought could be feasible.
Another is the challenge of power. What do we do about the power of large technology companies who are responsible for developing these technologies in the first place? In the 20th century, our main concern was with the economic power of large corporations. In the 21st century, we're going to be far more worried about their political power, about the impact they have on how we live together in society. Facebook is a good example of this.
And then the third challenge is the challenge of meaning and purpose. If we're moving towards a world with less work, then we should be thinking less about the future of work and more about the future of leisure. How do you provide people meaning and a purpose in a world where work no longer sits at the centre of their life?
The main thing we should be thinking about is how can we prepare people so that they have the skills and capabilities to do the sorts of jobs that have to be done.
But it seems to me that, in the end, those three problems are far better problems to have than the one that plagued our ancestors, which was how to make the economic pie large enough for everyone to live on. In the last few hundred years, those economic pies have exploded in size. Global GDP per head today is already about USD11,000. In 35 years, it will be double that. Thanks to technological progress we are very close to solving that fundamental economic problem. And that is why I'm fundamentally optimistic.
If you would like to hear more from Daniel Susskind and others on the future of work, listen to the Found in Conversation Podcast, click here: foundinconversation.pictet
