January 21, 2014 12:19 pm
A new machine era needs workers with fresh skills, say Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
It is easy to be pessimistic about jobs and pay these days. More and more work is being automated away by ever more powerful and capable technologies.
Not only can computers transcribe and translate normal human speech, they can also understand it well enough to carry out simple instructions. Machines now make sense of huge pools of unstructured information, and in many cases detect patterns and draw inferences better than highly trained and experienced humans. Recent advances include autonomous cars and aircraft, and robots that can work alongside humans in factories, warehouses and the open air.
These innovations are quickly leaving the lab and entering the wider economy, bringing new challenges for workers from tax preparers to burger flippers. Many have concluded that the era of large-scale technological unemployment has finally arrived. For these observers, labour trends visible in many countries – declining real wages and social mobility; rising inequality and polarisation; persistently high unemployment – are only going to accelerate as technology races ahead.
But the world is not ready to give up on human labour. Humanity is entering a second machine age. The first, spurred by the industrial revolution, was mechanical; this one is digital. The first augmented our muscles; the second, our minds.
History may not repeat itself but it certainly does rhyme, and the industrial revolution’s waves of mechanisation contain important insights for our time. The early decades of the 20th century are particularly illustrative. During that time, electric power, the internal combustion engine and other advances transformed industry. To John Maynard Keynes and others, they also seemed likely to lead to technological unemployment.
But instead, these innovations led to demand for very different kinds of workers – those that used their heads in addition to, or instead of, their hands and their backs.
Many societies responded to this demand by investing in education. The US invested especially heavily, and it is no coincidence that it raced ahead in productivity and living standards.
At the same time, entrepreneurs invented whole industries that drew on this new kind of workforce. Educated workers found they could demand high wages, which they spent on a wide array of goods and services, completing a virtuous cycle. Instead of technological unemployment, then, the postwar decades saw the emergence of a large, stable and prosperous middle class.
The lesson is clear: the industrial revolution started a race between technology and education – and, for most of the 20th century, humans won that race.
The second machine age will require workers with different skills. It once made sense to stress the memorisation of facts, and the ability to follow detailed instructions. But computers are already good at all of these, and getting better quickly. We will need to reinvent education and facilitate life-long learning.
Which human skills will still be in demand? We have yet to see a truly creative computer, or an innovative or entrepreneurial one. Nor have we seen a piece of digital gear that could unite people behind a common cause, or comfort a sick child with a gentle caress and knowing smile. And robots are still nowhere near able to repair a bridge or furnace, or care for a frail or injured person.
People will have important roles to play in the second machine age. But the difficulty many companies have in finding the employees they need up and down the skills ladder shows that our education systems are not keeping pace.
Before resigning ourselves to an era of mass unemployment, let us ensure that we are giving our people the skills they need to work alongside the astonishing technologies we are developing. Instead of assuming that human workers are marginalised, or that technology can never destroy jobs, let us instead work to give humans the tools and environment they need to thrive.
The writers are authors of ‘The Second Machine Age’
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