When machines do your job

Excerpts from the homonymous article, by Antonio Regalado on 11/07/2012,
featured in MIT's business report "The future of work". [1]

"Advances in hardware and software mean it's possible to automate more white-collar jobs, and to do so more quickly than in the past. Think of the airline staffers whose job checking in passengers has been taken by self-service kiosks. A tax preparer can get automated away by software like TurboTax, and just not find work anymore. An assembly line worker could be flat-out automated away by a robot on the assembly line. While more productivity is a positive, wealth is becoming more concentrated, and more middle-class workers are getting left behind."

Routine tasks have been steadily replaced by mechanical processes, either semi or fully automated. Starting with the physical tasks, and nowadays expanding everincreasingly to the mental tasks as well. Robotics, feeding systems, automated assembly lines etc., were the reason there aren't as many people working in manufacturing (compared to the previous century, or even more to the one before that), even though manufacturing is a growing industry.

There are of course exceptions, but the rule is that if you can replace a human by a machine or a program, it is better to do it. It is usually a one-off cost with low maintenance expenditure. Machines or programs do what you want, when you want it, they do not complain, they are always available, they can be terminated or rearranged as appropriate, and do not require management. Exceptions apply only when the labour force is dirt cheap. Take for example the IT boom in India, where amongst other software subcontracted work, numerous call centers were established to serve western customers, or China, the so called "world factory", where millions of workers are employed to manual, or with minimum automation assembly lines, costing a small fraction of the respective western worker. India and China for textiles and clothes manufacture. Africa for extensive mining. Brasil, the Philippines; The list is endless.

"The spread between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow, and more importantly, the absolute standard of living of the people at the middle and the bottom goes down. That is the economy that we don't want to head into."

Now the stakes are on for the mental tasks. Although high skilled workers have increased their actual time spent at work, the same trend does not apply for the inferior, or routtine tasks. Software programs are gradually replacing humans, and algorithms are increasingly assign tasks to people farms, for various tasks that computers are still not good at. People can make a few dollars per hour by tagging photographs, or going through spreadsheets or receipts; tasks assigned to them by a software program.

"Erik Brynjolfsson came up with a great phrase: "digital Athens." The Athenian citizens had lives of leisure; they got to participate in democracy and create art. That was largely because they had slaves to do the work. Okay, I don't want human slaves, but in a very, very automated and digitally productive economy you don't need to work as much, as hard, with as many people, to get the fruits of the economy. So the optimistic version is that we finally have more hours in our week freed up from toil and drudgery."

"The automation of knowledge work is way, way farther along. It's really hard to get computers to do things that your four-year-old can do, like walk across the room and pick up a pen, and recognize it as a pen. So the physical world presents a lot of challenges to digital technologies. But it feels as if we are starting to turn a corner. The data available to help a robot is big data, and it's exploding. The sensors have been progressing along a Moore's Law trajectory. And the physical pieces of a robot, the actuators and so on, have gotten a lot better too. So it seems the ingredients are all in place for the robots to start getting into the economy."

Successful businesses will be those that optimize the mix of humans, robots, and algorithms.

[1] Ref. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428429/when-machines-do-your-job/

Read more on the subject of the "Future of Work" :

http://www.technologyreview.com/businessreport/the-future-of-work/

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1898024,00.html

http://ccs.mit.edu/futureofwork/reading.html

http://bsr.london.edu/lbs-article/581/index.html

http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2011/07/the-future-of-work-20.html

http://ccs.mit.edu/futureofwork/reading.html