The
two great forces shaping the future at this time are globalization and
technology.
Globalization
has its benefits: We are more aware than ever of our interconnectedness with
other people, nations, and cultures. But it has its downside: corporations
outsource jobs to places where people work for less and there are no unions.
There is a story that President Obama once asked Steve Jobs what it would take
to bring Apple production back to the U.S., and Jobs replied, “Those jobs are
never coming back.” Why should they? It is cheaper to produce the devices in
China.
Technology
also has its good and bad sides. It has put us in instant touch with everyone
else, it has created new jobs, and it has made possible new ways of living and
working.
The
downside is that technology kills jobs by replacing humans with machines. Not
long ago, I had dinner with a retired executive of Kraft. One of his jobs was
supervising candy factories. He told me about factories that once employed
1,000 people but are now run by only two people.
A
recent series of articles in USA Today includes robots that will
increasingly replace workers in low-skill jobs.
“Low-skill
workers, experts say, need to look past any short-term job growth.
“We’re
moving the unskilled jobs into skilled jobs. And that is going to be a
challenge for us going forward,” says Henrik Christensen, director of the
Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. “If you are unskilled labor today, you’d better start thinking
about getting an education.”
“USA
TODAY’s analysis suggests some metro areas will gain more low-skill jobs in the
next two years than others. Tourist destinations, for example, are expected to
gain jobs such as food service workers, retail salespeople, housekeepers and
taxi drivers by 2017. Las Vegas is expected to add nearly 900 gaming dealers,
and Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., needs nearly 500 landscapers.
“Health
care jobs are growing nearly everywhere, and some construction jobs are showing
high demand in certain metro areas.
“Half
of all jobs — and 70% of low-skill jobs— may be replaced by robots or other
technology in 10 to 20 years, according to Frey’s research.”
Think
of it: if half of all jobs are automated, what will people do for work?
Then there is this article by
David Brooks. Quoting from an article by Kevin Kelly in “Wired,” he describes a
new world of artificial intelligence. It is a world where a very small number
of corporations and people grow ever more powerful.
He
writes:
“The
Internet is already heralding a new era of centralization. As Astra Taylor
points out in her book, “The People’s Platform,” in 2001, the top 10 websites
accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. page views, but, by 2010, they accounted
for 75 percent of them. Gigantic companies like Google swallow up smaller ones.
The Internet has created a long tail, but almost all the revenue and power is
among the small elite at the head.
“Advances
in artificial intelligence will accelerate this centralizing trend. That’s
because A.I. companies will be able to reap the rewards of network effects. The
bigger their network and the more data they collect, the more effective and
attractive they become.
“As
Kelly puts it, “Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so
big, so fast, that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a result, our A.I.
future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large,
general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.”
“To
put it more menacingly, engineers at a few gigantic companies will have
vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest
huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which the rest of
us make decisions and to steer our choices. If you think this power will be
used for entirely benign ends, then you have not read enough history.”
I
can’t see into the future but I don’t understand how our democracy can survive
this aggregation of power in so few hands. Or how a society like ours can
provide enough work if such a large part of the labor force is displaced by
robots.
Maybe
Bob Herbert is right in his book “Losing Our Way.” This might be the right time
for a vast public works project to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure. Real
jobs. High social value. A vision for the future. Unless, that is, the 1%
forbid it.