The End of Work?
Dateline: April 26, 1998
I BEGAN my focus on jobs put at risk by intelligence machines several months ago, and if you have been a regular reader you will have seen my efforts to be very specific about just which jobs are at risk through my EEEK! (Ellis's Endangered Employment Katalog) sections in the Intelligent Machine Post. Those efforts pre-date my reading of The End of Work by economist and best selling author Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995.
Rifkin forecast that 90 million low end jobs consisting of repetitive tasks were "potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines," and he reminded us of Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief's 1983 warning that humans will go the way of the horse in the business of providing goods and services.
Is it really the knacker's yard for us all? I don't think so, but it could be so for many of us if we don't do something soon to prevent it.
Rifkin provides a macroeconomic overview of what I write about at the microcosmic scale in EEEK!, and I urge you to read him. The book is excellent. But this essay is not a review nor a précis of the book. It is a thought piece; an attempt to integrate some of my thoughts about the future of work with some of Rifkin's insights. So if after reading this you think it's a load of rubbish, blame me, not Rifkin..
Two outcomes of automation, one
apocalyptic, one benignant, are generally forecast. The replacement of
humans by machines will either lead to mass unemployment, starvation,
crime, and social breakdown, or to a life of fun filled leisure
and plenty for all. Like all extremes, either is possible but neither
is likely. What is likely is a compromise, but the compromise
itself offers two lesser extremes, which I will label the Market Alternative
and the Social Alternative.
The Market Alternative offers more fun and plenty for fewer people at a cost of deprivation for more people. The Social Alternative offers less fun for a few people but also less deprivation for many people. It's the old conflict between Adam Smith and Karl Marx revisited; the operative word being "old." Marx and Smith were writing in less enlightened times, in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, when we had less information about and less control over the economy.
The way the "advanced" 19th and 20th century nation-state increased its prosperity was by seizing the assets--the natural resources and labor--of territories whose nation-statehood was less developed. The way to control the nation's economy was through the gross and blunt edged cudgel known as War. Today, we apply precise surgical tools to the task, cutting an interest rate here with the scalpel, grafting on a tariff there with the laser micro welder.
War is dead.
The other major difference between today and the Industrial Revolution is that today we have to work faster to integrate the market with the social alternatives, because time is shorter (see my earlier feature dealing with the rate of change) and because the danger (with literally billions more people--all better informed than the people of the Industrial Revolution--being affected) of not doing so is greater.
Three sectors that make up the total economy hold the keys to this integration of the Market and the Social Alternatives: the market (commerce and industry, capitalist, for-profit, etc.) sector, the government sector, and the civic (volunteer, non-profit, etc.) sector. The government sector has the mandate of the people to guide and control the market sector. The market sector has the skills and the means to implement government guidelines. The civic sector has some power to influence both government and the market, and would have more influence if it were better organized.
It is not in the market sector's interests for unemployment to dry up consumption or cause hordes of well informed (through the Internet) neo-Luddite desperadoes to blow up the factory robots (using powerful explosives for which recipes are readily available on the Internet) and hack and destroy the commercial computer centers (an easy challenge to many sufficiently disgruntled programmers).
Faced with such threats, the market has no alternative but to treat people as though they mattered (see E.F.. Schumacher's beautiful book, Small is Beautiful), if it is to survive. One would hope (pace Schumacher) that the market would care for people as a simple matter of ethics. If that is too much to hope, at least let enlightened self interest serve as a substitute.
The problem boils down to how to give people put out of work by machines the financial ability to continue consuming enough for their basic needs. Rifkin looks into a combination of government/community work programs, negative income taxes, value added taxes, etc., and concludes that the civic sector can assume most of the burden. I would add to this conclusion the observation that the clear trend toward downsizing of mega-corporations has a logical culmination in everyone being their own master, and I think technology has everything to do with that.
In this new economics of billions of small scale cottage businesses, technology provides the communicative and the manufacturing capabilities formerly accessible only to the large business and its capital. The PC, the Internet, and AI programs together provide any individual with enough brains and knowledge to match the old style Captains of Industry, and inexpensive PC/AI-driven machines provide the means for people to build things and provide services once requiring huge capital.
Go to Home Depot (for non-U.S. readers, that's a huge chain of superstores carrying just about everything imaginable for the do-it-yourselfer), and for not much capital at all one can walk out with lathes, drill presses, small tractors and other farm machinery . . . all one needs to run a small manufactory, build a house, or farm a few acres of land. We will build our own houses, grow our own food, and make things for other people and for the large conglomerates still needed for major projects such as space exploration.
It won't be the end of work at all.
It'll be the end of dull, repetitive work, all right, and the end of exploitation.
It will be the end of enforced drudgery, and the beginning of fulfillment.
Until
next week, 
NEXT WEEK: To be determined.
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