Job or Task Displacement – We Don’t Know Nuffin’

For anyone whose employment depends in whole or in part of some piece of relatively sophisticated, memory-chip-driven equipment – from a computer to a digital measuring device – you already have faced the driving forces of artificial intelligence. Obviously, on the one hand, the more technologically complex the work or, on the other, how repetitive the task, the more like that technology has already redefined that job, particularly in the developed world. Think that’s not you? Remember, todays’ average smart phone has more computing power than the entire, fully-loaded Apollo 11 mission to the moon!

But we are told that most of us will face losing jobs that are about to be rendered obsolete by AI? What does that mean anyway? Many folks in the same job category that existed fifty years ago clearly aren’t doing the what those workers did half a century ago. Totally different, from manufacturing worker to attorney. Is the addition of AI to our work mix just an upgrade? Yet, the numbers seem scary, as the November 5^th Los Angeles Times reminds us:

“A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said that about 46% of jobs have a better-than-even chance of being automated. A 2016 study by Citigroup Inc. and the University of Oxford reported that 57% of jobs were at high risk of automation, although a 2013 paper by two of the same researchers predicted 47%. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report comes up with somewhat lower numbers, though it varies by country.

“These are large numbers. Even more troubling, they’re all fairly similar — each of the studies seems to come to the conclusion that roughly half of all jobs are very vulnerable to automation. But don’t panic — nobody really knows how many jobs will be replaced by robots, or even what it means to be replaced.

“What does it mean for a job to be lost to automation? Does it mean that a person is rendered entirely obsolete as a worker, and is forced to go on the welfare rolls? Or does it mean that she loses her current job, with her current company? If a person gets a new job at a different company in the same industry for more pay, does it still count as a job loss? What about for 85% as much pay?

“The studies are not clear about this. Usually, their basic methodology is to show some technology experts a description of a job — or the tasks that, on paper, a job is said to require — and then ask the experts whether they think technology will soon be able to do those tasks. But even assuming that the experts are correct — that there isn’t another AI winter or broad technological stagnation — nobody really knows what happens to a job whose tasks can be automated.”

The tariff-solution Trump administration is telling us that China and the rest of the world have stolen our jobs… and we need to use those tariffs to get those (mostly manufacturing) jobs back into the good old USA. No question that “globalization” did just that: take those “repetitive step” blue collar work (moving next to “repetitive step” white collar work) American jobs and moved them to cheap-labor outsource mills overseas. It hurt a lot of people. They don’t call the “Rust Belt” without reason.

We did lose millions of jobs to international providers, and what’s worse, we rather dramatically ignored those blue-collar masses whose 20^th century skills were insufficient to secure a comparable income in the 21^st century. Families with blue collar traditions, work done nobly from one generation to the next… we simply shoved them out the economic door in this country.

Democrats, once the protectors of the working class, stepped up their “noble cause” rhetoric but seemed put out, inconvenienced even, by whining blue-collars workers from either displacement from obsolete jobs (assembly line manufacturing, for example) or industries where their products were simply no longer in demand (coal, for example).

The GOP pricked up their ears and slid out of their “free trade” mantra and seized on the anti-globalization banner embraced by Donald Trump. Smart move, Republicans. They made promises that they couldn’t keep, but at least the GOP was listening. They had someone to blame… conveniently Democrats (now labeled “globalists). And even though the Dems are the ones who began a successful fix in the post-recession economy that got screwed up on a Republican watch, incumbents always take credit for anything good that happens when they are in power and blame the opposition for all that ails us.

Those grassroot, meat-and-potatoes money issues are the stuff that can elevate the astute and decimate the oblivious. But even as globalization is not really the job killer it once was, unemployed and underemployed blue-collar workers still think it is. Artificial intelligence has leaked into the system so slowly – no overnight plant closings shipped elsewhere – that it just isn’t as sexy a battleground. That reshoring manufacturing jobs just make the owners of the automated equipment rich but does not return the old blue-collar cadre to their high-paying jobs is irrelevant. Spin those numbers.

But the future will definitely redefine what humans do in the workplace versus what automated machines take on. The need to upgrade skills and education will become constant and routine. Changing jobs is now a defined pattern as it has never been before. But will jobs go or tasks just be reassigned? “The infusion of artificial intelligence, robotics and big data into the workplace is elevating the demand for people’s ingenuity, to reinvent a process or rapidly solve problems in an emergency.

“The new blue-collar labor force will need four ‘distinctively more human’ core competencies for advanced production: complex reasoning, social and emotional intelligence, creativity and certain forms of sensory perception, said Jim Wilson, a managing director at Accenture, a consulting firm.

“‘Work in a certain sense, and globally in manufacturing, is becoming more human and less robotic,’ says Wilson, who helped lead an Accenture study on emerging technologies and employment needs covering 14,000 companies in 14 large, industrialized nations.

“Few narratives in economics and social policy are as alarmist as the penetration of automation and artificial intelligence into the workplace, especially in manufacturing… Economists talk about the hollowing-out of middle-income employment. American political discourse is full of nostalgia for high-paying blue-collar jobs. The Trump administration is imposing tariffs and rewriting trade agreements to entice companies to keep plants in the U.S. or even bring them back.

“The stark reality is that automation will continue to erode repetitive work no matter where people do it. But there is also a myth in this narrative that suggests America has permanently lost its edge. The vacant mills in the Southeast and Midwest, and the struggling cities around them, are evidence of how technology and low-cost labor can rapidly kill off less-agile industries. This isn’t necessarily a prologue to what’s next, however.

“Cutting-edge manufacturing not only involves the extreme precision of a Rolls Royce turbofan disc. It’s also moving toward mass customization and what Erica Fuchs calls ‘parts consolidation’ — making more-complex blocks of components so a car, for example, has far fewer parts. This new frontier often involves experimentation, with engineers learning through frequent contact with production staff, requiring workers to make new kinds of contributions.

“‘This is a chance for the U.S. to lead. We have the knowledge and skills,’ says Fuchs, an engineering and public-policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. ‘When you move manufacturing overseas, it can become unprofitable to produce with the most advanced technologies.’” LA Times. Workers need new, more challenging skills. Which brings me back to grassroots economics, but this time the GOP is the party that just may have missed the boat.

The notion of company-provided fringe benefits, particularly healthcare and retirement, is becoming a new “meat-and-potatoes” issue as workers no longer see lifetime employment as real, or where they are forced into a contractor worker (gig economy) and must provide for themselves. And so the GOP is finding their own Achilles Heel with their blue-collar base: Healthcare. No meaningful effort to contain prescription drug costs. A nasty track record of voting down fixes for the Affordable Care Act (a GOP Congress voting over 60 times to repeal the whole thing) and championing higher costs or exclusions for preexisting conditions (even in the 50-64 demographic of traditionally more conservative voters). That has terrified a growing number in the GOP base. But the future will change the workforce and the workplace. We may not have all the answers, but we do need to implement what we do know and what workers now and in the future are telling us they need. Congress, both sides of the aisle, better start listening!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the only constant we clearly face is change… accelerating like never before.