 |
Toyota presents an experimental automated car at the 2013 International Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 7 ,2013. AFP PHOTO/JOE
KLAMAR |
WASHINGTON:
They seem right out of a Hollywood fantasy, and they are: Cars that drive
themselves have appeared in movies like "I, Robot" and the television
show "Knight Rider."
Now, three
years after Google invented one, automated cars could be on their way to a
freeway near you. In the U.S., California and other states are rewriting the
rules of the road to make way for driverless cars. Just one problem: What
happens to the millions of people who make a living driving cars and trucks -
jobs that always have seemed sheltered from the onslaught of technology?
"All
those jobs are going to disappear in the next 25 years," predicts Moshe
Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Driving by
people will look quaint; it will look like a horse and buggy."
If
automation can unseat bus drivers, urban deliverymen, long-haul truckers, even
cabbies, is any job safe?
Vardi poses
an equally scary question: "Are we prepared for an economy in which 50
percent of people aren't working?"
An
Associated Press analysis of employment data from 20 countries found that
millions of midskill, midpay jobs already have disappeared over the past five
years, and they are the jobs that form the backbone of the middle class in
developed countries.
That
experience has left a growing number of technologists and economists wondering
what lies ahead. Will middle-class jobs return when the global economy
recovers, or are they lost forever because of the advance of technology? The
answer may not be known for years, perhaps decades. Experts argue among
themselves whether the job market will recover, muddle along or get much worse.
To
understand their arguments, it helps to understand the past.
Every time
a transformative invention took hold over the past two centuries - whether the
steamboat in the 1820s or the locomotive in the 1850s or the telegraph or the
telephone - businesses would disappear and workers would lose jobs. But new
businesses would emerge that employed even more.
The
combustion engine decimated makers of horse-drawn carriages, saddles, buggy
whips and other occupations that depended on the horse trade. But it also
resulted in huge auto plants that employed hundreds of thousands of workers,
who were paid enough to help create a prosperous middle class.
"What
has always been true is that technology has destroyed jobs but also always
created jobs," says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz of
Columbia University. "You know the old story we tell about (how) the car
destroyed blacksmiths and created the auto industry."
The
astounding capabilities of computer technology are forcing some mainstream
economists to rethink the conventional wisdom about the economic benefits of
technology, however. For the first time, we are seeing machines that can think
- or something close to it.
In the
early 1980s, at the beginning of the personal computer age, economists thought
computers would do what machines had done for two centuries - eliminate jobs
that required brawn, not brains. Low-level workers would be forced to seek
training to qualify for jobs that required more skills. They'd become more
productive and earn more money. The process would be the same as when
mechanization replaced manual labor on the farm a century ago; workers moved to
the city and got factory jobs that required higher skills but paid more.
But it
hasn't quite worked out that way. It turns out that computers most easily
target jobs that involve routines, whatever skill level they require. And the
most vulnerable of these jobs, economists have found, tend to employ midskill
workers, even those held by people with college degrees - the very jobs that
support a middle-class, consumer economy.
So the rise
of computer technology poses a threat that previous generations of machines
didn't: The old machines replaced human brawn but created jobs that required
human brains. The new machines threaten both.
"Technological
change is more encompassing and moving faster and making it harder and harder
to find things that people have a comparative advantage in" versus
machines, says David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology who has studied the loss of midpay jobs to technology.
Here are
the three scenarios that economists and technologists offer about jobs in the
future:
It has
always happened before. Europe and the United States endured repeated economic
and social upheaval during the 19th and early 20th centuries as their
agricultural economies transformed into industrial ones. Columbia's Stiglitz
argues that such pressures led to the collapse of the world economy in 1929 -
the cataclysm we call the Great Depression.
The
mechanization of farming caused agricultural production to soar worldwide in
the 1920s - prices to plunge. In the U.S., crop and livestock prices fell by 50
percent between 1929 and 1932. American farmers, who accounted for a fifth of
the U.S. workforce, lost purchasing power and also struggled to pay their
mortgages and other loans. As their debts went bad, banks began to collapse,
squeezing credit and spreading panic. The economy went into free-fall.
Only World
War II - and the massive rearmament program it required - restored the U.S.
economy to full health. The experience was traumatizing. And today only 2
percent of Americans work on farms.
"Economies
don't make these transitions well," Stiglitz says. People in the dying
parts of the economy can't afford to invest in the education or retraining they
need to find different work. "So you get workers trapped in the wrong
sectors or unemployed," he says.
Peter
Lindert, an economist at the University of California-Davis, says computers are
more disruptive than earlier innovations because they are "general-purpose
technologies" used by all kinds of companies. They upend many industries
instead of just a few. The mechanized looms the Luddites hated in England in
the early 1800s, for instance, rattled one industry. Information technology
touches every business.
The changes
are coming much faster this time, too. Lindert says that's showing up in the
steep drop in prices for some products this time.
In the
Industrial Revolution, "the price of textiles went down. But it was a
small number compared to how the cost of information storage has gone down.
It's a fraction of what it was in the 1970s," Lindert says. Now, computing
power is doubling every 18 months to two years - and the price is plummeting.
But Lindert
does not believe workers are doomed to unemployment. With the right skills and
education, he says, they can learn to work with the machines and become productive
enough to fend off the automation threat.
"There
is a period of time that is extremely disruptive," says Thomas Schneider,
CEO of the consultancy Restructuring Associates. "If you're 55 years old
now and lose your job, the odds of you ever getting hired into what you were
doing before is as close to zero as you can imagine. If you are a 12-year-old,
you have a very bright future. It's just not doing what your father was doing
or your mother was doing."
The rise of
the iPhone, for instance, has put more than 290,000 people to work on related
iPhone apps since 2007, according to Apple. That suggests that new technology
continues to create new types of jobs that require higher skills and
creativity.
"Over
the long run, I have confidence we can do it," Stiglitz says. But, he
warns, "I can see us being in this kind of doldrums for half a decade, for
a decade, or for longer."
Some
economists worry that the sluggish, lopsided labor market of the past five
years is what we'll be stuck with in the future.
Smarter
machines and niftier software will continue to replace more and more midpay
jobs, making businesses more productive and swelling their profits.
The most
highly skilled workers - those who can use machines to be more productive but
can't be replaced by them - will continue to prosper. Many low-pay jobs are
likely to remain sheltered from the technological offensive: Robots are too
clumsy to tidy up hotel rooms or clear dirty dishes at busy restaurants.
"Computers
can do calculus better than any human being," says Andrew McAfee,
principal research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business. But
"restaurant bus boy is a very safe job for a long time to come."
Under this
scenario, technology could continue to push economic growth - but only a few
would enjoy the benefits. More people would be competing for midpay jobs, so
pay would shrivel. Many midskill workers would be left unemployed or shunted
into low-skill, low-pay jobs. The income gap between the rich and ordinary
citizens, already at record levels in many developed countries, would continue
to widen.
Most
economists say that unequal societies don't prosper; it takes a large and
confident middle class to produce the consumer spending that drives healthy
economic growth. "In the long run, you could actually see growth
stopping," says economist Maarten Goos at Belgium's University of Leuven.
"If everyone is employed in low-wage service jobs, then, that's it."
In a speech
last year, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers declared that the
biggest economic issue of the future would not be the federal debt or
competition from China but "the dramatic transformations that technology
is bringing about."
Summers
imagined a machine called the "Doer" that could make anything or
provide any service. Productivity would soar. Wonderful goods and services
would emerge. Enormous wealth would go "to those who could design better
Doers, to those who could think of better things for Doers to do." But
everyone else would be worthless in the labor market.
Summers
said the world is moving in that direction and has completed only 15 percent of
the journey, but already we are "observing its consequences."
Consequences,
indeed. ATMs dislodged bank tellers. Microsoft Outlook manages what secretaries
used to do. Expedia is replacing travel agents. E-ZPass is doing away with
toll-booth operators. And robots continue to supplant factory workers.
But surely
some jobs are safe. Truck drivers, perhaps? A machine can't negotiate a
left-hand turn against oncoming traffic without a human behind the wheel, can
it? Or so economists Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane of Harvard
University reasoned in their book "The New Division of Labor," way
back in 2004.
That was
then.
Six years
later, Google developed a car that could drive itself, crossing the Golden Gate
Bridge, circling Lake Tahoe and cruising down Hollywood Boulevard. The gee-whiz
driverless car could soon claim victims in the job market.
"Twice
a week, a truck comes near my house, and two guys get out and pick up the
garbage," says Vardi, the Rice computer scientist. "This will
disappear. There will still be a truck coming, but it will be driven
autonomously, and the garbage will be picked up autonomously, and those jobs
will be gone."
In the
United States alone, 92,000 people are employed as sanitation workers,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Add all other driving occupations,
from long-haul truckers to taxi cab drivers, and the total exceeds 4 million.
All those jobs may be in danger.
And that's
the future: Other occupations already are disappearing. Add up the jobs that
technology can take across dozens of occupations and the result, Vardi and
others warn, is unemployment on a scale we haven't begun to imagine.
"The
vast majority of people do routine work. The human economy has always demanded
routine work," says software entrepreneur Martin Ford. He worries that
machines will take all those routine jobs, leaving few opportunities for
ordinary workers.
In his book
"The Lights in the Tunnel," Ford foresees a computer-dominated
economy with 75 percent unemployment before the end of this century; the vast
majority of workers, he predicts, won't be able to develop the skills necessary
to outrun job-killing computers and robots.
"People
talk about the future, creating new industries and new businesses," Ford
says. "But there's every indication that these are not going to be in
labor-intensive industries. ... Right from the get-go, they're going to be digital."
Consider
the great business successes of the Internet age: Apple employs 80,000 people
worldwide; Google, 54,000; Facebook, 4,300. Combined, those three superstar
companies employ less than a quarter of the 600,000 people General Motors had
in the 1970s. And today, GM employs just 202,000 people, while making more cars
than ever.
As far back
as 1958, American union leader Walter Reuther recalled going through a Ford
Motor plant that was already automated. A company manager goaded him:
"Aren't you worried about how you are going to collect union dues from all
these machines?"
"The
thought that occurred to me," Reuther replied, "was how are you going
to sell cars to these machines?"
Related Article:
"THE NEXT 18 YEARS"– Dec 2, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll) (Subjects: You are looking at a Quantum event, clearing a filter - Portal pineal , Higher self to step forward and communicate to You, Still remains in 3D but exposure to multi dimensions, Evolution of humanity, Intent, Mayan Calendar, Midpoint on 21-12-2012, 26.000 Years, Milky Way, Nostradamus, 1987, Beginning to a New Time, Channellers/Teachers, Center of Galaxy – Black hole, Bridge of Swords, Pleiadians, Children, Inventions – The discoveries (e.g. : Airplanes - Medicines – Radio ...): These new Discoveries were given all over the planet when Human consciousness was ready for it, New Inventions are coming, the timing depends on how the middle East problems are solved, Biology reaction of quantum energy; new radio of the future, seeing quantum energy, when it is revealed all science books will have to be rewritten, This will be an AHA moment – be possible to communicate with the rest of Galaxy, NASA, Church/religion will be effected the most by these discoveries, The quantum discovery will see the grid, life, gardens and will redefine life, DNA (3 billion pieces) evolving piece DNA are chancing, Gaia/Humanity are linked, new instruments will start to reveal the DNA variance, Evolution revealed: Autistic children have born with the removal of their 3D structure in the brain, Gaia/Spirit are testing these quantum beings (Evolved DNA), Universe central clock = Rifs, Globally there will be only 5 currencies, Wars on earth will be declared barbaric, Middle East, Global Unity, .. etc.)
"The New Paradigm of Reality" Part I/II – Feb 12, 2011 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) (Subjects:
Who/What is Kryon ?, Egypt Uprising, Iran/Persia Uprising, Peace in Middle East
without Israel actively involved, Muhammad, "Conceptual" Youth
Revolution, "Conceptual" Managed Business, Internet, Social Media,
News Media, Google, Bankers, Dictators, Global Unity,..... etc.)
