Posted on 11/14/2011 5:04:36 PM PST by gitmo
Is information technology destroying more jobs than it creates? That’s long been the conventional wisdom, of course. Proponents of IT, on the other hand, point to the new types of opportunities created as a result of the march of technology — from programming to analytics to technicians.
However, two longtime proponents of IT as an opportunity creator — Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both with MIT — have taken a darker view of IT’s impact on the economy.
In the latest edition of MIT Technology Review, David Talbot reviewed Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s new book: Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, and pulls out the observation that the digital economy may be favoring that 1% at the top of the pyramid while sapping opportunities at lower levels of the economy.
The first decade of the 2000s was a time of accelerating technology, accompanied by stagnant employment growth, the authors point out. Employment fell by 1% during the past decade, compared to 20% growth in the 1980s and 1990s. This is no coincidence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee say. For example, increasing automation has dramatically reduced the need for customer service workers across many industries, such as airline reservations or directory assistance, the authors point out. MacAfee also points out that “certain kinds of document examination once done by armies of lawyers—can now be done competently by scanning technologies and software.”
It’s not the labor-intensive or professional jobs that will be replaced by automation — top executives may see their roles increasingly automated as well. Just last week, SmartPlanet Editor-in-Chief Larry Dignan reported on Gartner analyst Nigel Rayner’s prediction that within a couple of decades, “many of the things executives do today will be automated.” Rayner observes that the only thing standing in the way of more automated executive decision-making is “business culture.” But, “effectively, most of what the CFO, CEO and managers do today will be done better by machines,” he says.
In addition, as Brynjolfsson and McAfee observe, “intelligent assistants and question-answer software—of which IBM’s Watson is one example—may accelerate the trend. (Talbot’s review and the book were written prior to Apple’s Siri introduction, so the implications of intelligent assistants in the palm of one’s hand were not explored.)
The rise of robotic automation is another trend, and in the book, Brynjolfsson observes that global electronics manufacturer Foxconn “plans to replace many of its factory workers in China with a million new robots.”
The employment numbers for this decade that Brynjolfsson and McAfee site are disturbing, and technology may be to blame, at least to a partial degree. But these official numbers but don’t take into account the emergence and evolution of entrepreneurial ventures. And technologies such as cloud computing and social networking are providing immense, low-cost resources for new business creation. Many of these new ventures are off the radar.
Talbot also offers an opposing point of view as well: Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow, for one, says it has been the norm throughout the course of history for technology to throw people out of work. But in the long run, employment keeps growing, and wages keep rising.
At the IBM Watson University Symposium at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management, McAfee moderated a panel on the role of computers in 2020 (live-blogged by Paul Gillin), in which MIT’s Rodney Brooks made the observation that the rapid development of IT in North America is providing a competitive edge in the global economy:
“We think manufacturing is disappearing from the US, but in reality there is still $2 trillion in manufacturing in the US. What we’ve done is go after the high end. We have to find things to manufacture that the Chinese can’t. What this has led to is manufacturing jobs getting higher tech. If we can build robotic tools that help people, we can get incredible productivity. The PC didn’t get rid of office workers; it made them do things differently. We have to do that with robots. We can take jobs back from China but they won’t be the same jobs. That doesn’t mean people have to be engineers to work. Instead of a factory worker doing a repetitive task, he can supervise a team of robots doing repetitive tasks.”
More discussion on technology’s impact on jobs and job creation is available from IBM’s live-blogging coverage of the IBM Watson Challenge symposium. McAfee points out that technology now offers organizations robust analytic toolkits that enable greater insights and predictions on market trends. (IBM is sponsor of the SmartPlanet site.) As Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer observed at the symposium: “Cloud computing and other technologies can help entrepreneurs get started and build companies and hire people. So a lot of small companies will spring up—not the high tech companies but companies that take advantage of technology.”
(Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.)
>> If we were all subsistence level farmers, there would be
>> almost no unemployment.
But such existence is hard, brutal and a constant struggle. How many people you know actually live completely off the grid using 18th-19th century amenities?
One cannot look at employment and technology in isolation. There is still plenty, if not much more, manufacturing in the world today (somebody has to make the computers, industrial robots, and smart phones). But two factors have shifted this jobs offshore: the difference in labor costs and the difference in regulatory costs. One of those is hard to compete with, the other we simply ceded to the third world.
Another issue is how we catorgorize things. The person who assembles the industrial robot is considered in a manufacturing job, but the person who wrote the software controlling the robot is not. The same applies to the Foxconn Chinese slave laborers who assemble the iPhone and the workers in California who write iOS.
Finally, for those jobs that cannot be outsourced (agriculture), we have allowed these jobs to effectively be outsourced via illegal immigration.
We can talk all we want about agricultural jobs being low-paying, but to import an underclass to do this work when we have an in-place, unemployed underclass in the same geography suggests some unemployment is a choice.
Information technology has created tens of millions of jobs - in China, India, and other Third World pits. Not so many in the US, though. That not the fault of new technology. That's the direct result of government and corporate policy.
Thanks for sharing. I was not speaking for the Entire World, in case I neglected to make myself clear.
Damn kiosks! Is there any reason for hope that at least all the people put out of work are bitter clingers?? < / The Won mode >
LOL.
My wife asked me why I always go to the self checkout lines in the grocery store. I had never thought about it, but I answered, “So I don’t have to talk to people.”
I do it because I’m a better checker than they are. Disclaimer : when. I get done. I can leave. They just get another customer.
...low blood sugar and too much filtered news makes my commentary too vitriolic.... At least that’s what my spouse says.
"ATMs have destroyed the banking industry, which is too bad, because thousands of my stooges have spent the past month and a half attacking banks, and of course, our common enemy, the Jew."
Sigh. This is the crap that happens when you post from a mobile. D'oh!
bttt
Asimov explored this in his "Foundation" and "Robot" novels. Some of the implications aren't pretty.
Yeah, but those were science fiction novels, and our future with machines/robots/computers, is not about the worst of consequences.
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