Automation has been a boon for humanity. And yet people have always feared it. The backlash against technology – ‘techlash’ – is nothing new, argues Carl Frey, an Oxford University academic specialising in employment and technology. It’s as much of a factor now as it was for the Luddites who destroyed mechanised looms in the 19th century. What's important is how businesses and governments help people to adapt.
These days, workers are worried that robots and sophisticated software will make them redundant. The worry is not limited to call centre workers or bank and supermarket clerks who are already being squeezed out. Nor to the taxi and truck drivers facing a future of autonomous vehicles. It also concerns the loan officers, lawyers, equity analysts and accountants, whose skills are being reproduced and often bettered by artificial intelligence systems constantly learning new skills, abetted by ever more powerful and faster computers.
Real as they seem, many of these fears are misplaced, says Frey. Much as past technology made us immeasurably better off, so too will current innovations, he argues.
“We’re roughly 30 times richer than at the start of the industrial revolution adjusted for inflation,” says Frey.
Then servants did rich people’s work. “Today we all have access to electric servants. Technology has had an enormously equalising effect.”
Money doesn’t come close to expressing how much better people are off now.
At the end of the 19th century three quarters of the population worked in agriculture for little more than subsistence wages. That proportion has since dropped to one in 50 and yet we have more food available to us at lower cost than ever. Instead of cold muddy fields and dangerous coal mines, most of us now work in air conditioned offices.
Transition, however, is often painful.
By 1850, Manchester was a great industrial engine, but many of its workers lived brutal, degraded lives.
Accompanying mass urbanisation was squalor, disease and pollution. Britons born in the mid-19th century were shorter than those born a hundred years earlier – height is a good proxy for health. Little wonder then that the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx grew out of these conditions. And little wonder that people often resisted – industrialisation and technological progress often had to be forced on the wider public by politicians and plutocrats.
“Computers rather than steam are the drivers of social tension now – income inequality has risen to levels not seen since the industrial revolution,” notes Frey.
This latest upheaval started in the 1980s when computers became small and cheap enough to affect the labour market. Although digital technology has widely benefited consumers and boosted productivity, it hasn’t been good for everyone. The offshoring of jobs and the use of robots to take over low-skilled repetitive tasks has led to four consecutive decades of falling real wages for American men with no more than a high school degree. The sort of low-skilled assembly line jobs that used to be a mainstay for those who left education at a young age have been replaced by machines.
Even with low national unemployment, there’s been a political backlash in the parts of the US where robots have been heavily adopted.
So far, workers in non-traded sectors – typically services like barbers and restaurants – have been shielded from globalisation and the rise of Chinese exports. But they too will start to feel the negative effects of technology as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful and more widely adopted.
Rise of the machine
“The rise of machine learning and AI machines is changing the rules of the game,” Frey says. Google Translate and the invention of autonomous vehicles already give clues as to how dramatically some of these skilled service sector jobs will be affected. While these technologies are still imperfect, it is important to remember that every revolution in technology begins with imperfect technology. The early stem engines were merely used to drain coal mines, yet as they became more energy efficient they eventually morphed into the drivers of the industrial revolution.
“There are 5 million cashiers in the US whose jobs are being threatened by Amazon Go [Amazon’s cashier-free brick and mortar stores]. There are up to 3.5 million bus, taxi and truck drivers who are all threatened by autonomous vehicles and roughly 2.2 million people working in call centres whose jobs are being threatened by Google’s new voice assistant,” he says. “There’s no industry that’s going to be completely unaffected by this.”
Not all these jobs will be automated at once. Cutting edge technology is often expensive and businesses tend to hold off financing new investments and scrapping old equipment until there’s a solid financial case to do so. And history shows that when people feel they’re not benefiting from technology, they dig their heels in against it. This could mean them voting in regulatory and tax barriers – like a levy on robots.
“Businesses need to be worried about this,” Frey says. And, indeed, some companies are starting to react. Amazon is investing in retraining and reskilling the workforce. In other cases, new systems are being developed that allow people to become owners of their own data, taking that power away from Google and Facebook.
The history of automation is both a history of progress and conflict. Thanks to the industrial revolution, people live longer, more comfortable existences than they did a quarter of a millennium ago. And the digital revolution promises further big advances. But the transition has never been painless, nor will it be now.
