Just earlier this week, I was talking with a colleague about all the hidden jobs that no longer exist because of software. And these are not jobs that dramatically went away all at once, like a team of longshoremen being cut in the movies.
Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do.
Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common.
Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software.
There are more jobs lost silently to these kinds of developments than any factory being shut down dramatically. (for the US at least)
Alternatively, a lot more businesses were created because the sum total of labor required to run a business went down, so businesses that would have been unprofitable back when it took a room of bookkeepers to manage a department store can now exist.
People think that economics is a zero-sum game, but the endless drive for efficiency and productivity is what makes our world possible and lifted billions out of abject poverty. It is the opposite of zero-sum.
The value that economics promises to create is wealth-weighted. By this metric, destroying the ability of a million people to eek by is a huge win if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much.
Thankfully, as you point out, it often does the exact opposite and makes everyone richer! But not always, not reliably, certainly not as a fundamental guarantee. "The Wedge" plot illustrates this fickleness, where about 40 years ago the American story switched from "a rising tide floats all boats" to "rich get richer, poor get poorer." The economy kept growing, but the overwhelming majority of people not only did not manage to capture a share of the new growth, they did not even manage to hold on to what they had. Yes, those on top scooped up more money than those on the bottom lost -- but how is that supposed to be comforting?
It frustrates me when certain elements preach the prosperity gospel while framing it as a matter of fact rather than self-serving faith. I personally have faith that we'll eventually figure out a compromise, but I don't believe that denying blatant trends helps us get there.
>if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much.
But that never happens. Ten million multiplied by twenty million is 200 trillion. You can't make 200 trillion dollars by taking a dollar away from a million people. Nobody has ever made 200 trillion dollars from anything, but if they did, it makes no sense to think there's some way it could be done by impoverishing a million people who have almost nothing. It sounds as illogical as the Matrix use of humans as batteries.
I think you misparsed that sentence as "20 million as much [as 10 million as much as one of those people]", where it should be "20 million as much [of one of those people]". An x2 multiplier, instead of an x20 million one.
Trying to put it in concrete terms - Jeff Bezos has maybe $180B. One ten-millionth is $18K. So the scenario is, suppose Bezos got his $180B by taking $1800 each from a million people, who relied on that capital to live, and somehow multiplied it by ten.
Since nearly everyone rich has less than Bezos, anything that happens a fair amount would involve smaller numbers.
It's not as absurd as making $200 trillion, but it still doesn't sound to me like a thing that happens to the extent that it says something about economics or utilitarianism or whatever. It seems like a contrived trolley problem to me.
Absolutely. A friend of mine started selling her cookies online without any help from anyone tech-savvy. She found out about Wix, Canva, Stripe and a bunch of other tools and setup her own business during COVID. She's not coming back to her old job.
True. Although with the increasing rate of changes, there would be a point where people can't re-skill themselves faster than their jobs are replaced by AI or software. Imagine change to a completely different job every 5 years. Hopefully societies are mostly well-off to give people food while they are busy learning another craft that hasn't been made obsolete.
My father-in-law provides a good counterpoint. He worked at a bridge span builder when PCs were coming out. A supplier gave them 5 Apple computers for buying something. His boss told him to throw them away it’s just some fad.
That night he picked up a manual and learned a little BASIC and put together a program to do some calculations for manufacturing bridge spans. It would normally take 3 guys 2 days double checking and redoing the precise calculations but the Apple II took minutes. Now 3 guys were free to do other things and a bottle neck was removed. The company could take on more work and the boss was pleased. “Take those things out of the trash!”
What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful.
|What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful.
I would almost change it to say "what the boss didn't really understand was how to use the computers to make my employees more productive". I think the specifics in how you automate is incredibly important, and there are many cases of how it can fail. 737 Max MCAS system is a prime example of how ramming automation through without consideration of "human factors" leads to massive failure.
In this case, the man-hours per bridge drop. But how many man-hours were available in the field pre-computer? So now we've got excess man-hours and we've got a choice. Either move those man-hours to higher value tasks OR release the bridgespanneteers from the job.
And that's the conundrum we face with automation where we remove bottlenecks, and we can't retask the capacity.
Cashiers are on their way out. You can walk into any Walmart and see two people in line for 10 minutes because of the 50 available registers only 2 are open. Walmart wants to drive people to use the self checkout. I hate it because invariably something goes wrong and you have to compete for the sole person manning that section.
Self-checkout only stores is exactly what hell looks like. I hate self checkouts with a burning passion, if not for the sake that I got duped as a consumer to work for the company, while paying the same price on my goods, but for the fact that they aren't faster, they certainly aren't friendlier, and generally cause a certain level of frustration or anxiety for the consumer.
If you care about accessibility and not being ageist, they are terrible for people with disabilities or the elderly. You will almost see no old or disabled person using a self checkout line.
As a show of more anecdotal evidence, a recent large grocery store chain in my large populated city of 2+ million people experiment with going self-checkout only failed so bad (lost so many customers and people were complaining), they hired cashiers again to basically scan people's groceries for them at the self-checkout line. Now they are stuck with the worst of both worlds.
Get better self-checkouts. The ones that try to simulate how a traditional checkout works are stupid, the same way a mechanical messenger pigeon would be stupid but email is pretty good.
A friend of mine has several serious problems. He much prefers the self-checkout. No human interactions, which means no need to try to figure out what the other person thought they were communicating.
It was much better during the worst of lockdown too. I go in, I pick up items I want, I scan them and place them in my backpack, I go to the checkout, I hold the same device I used to scan items near the checkout, it acknowledges that I agreed to pay for the items I scanned, I put the backpack onto my back and I walk out of the store. Minimal contact, no human interaction, very low risk. Nice.
I hate this thought process with the same burning passion you hate self checkout, probably more in fact.
You dutifully wander through the aisles gathering your goods, You slide your card, operate the pin pad, carry your own goods to your car. These are all goal directed activities you completed for YOURSELF in order that you could consume or use the products you have so acquired. There is no fundamental difference between scanning your own goods and sliding a card.
You aren't paying for someone to scan eggs and put it in a little bag you are paying for someone to manage every step between where the hen laid the egg and making it conveniently available on a shelf 1/2 a mile from where you live.
You aren't getting paid for doing it yourself like you aren't getting paid for carrying your own goods to your car instead you are benefiting from a price point enabled by the degree of automation and self service that the store engages in. Its ironic that people simultaneously flock to stores that have even slightly lower prices while complaining about lack of help. Simultaneously driving and bemoaning the same trend.
Your anecdote about bringing back the cashiers for the worst of both worlds sounds like a buggy whip manufacturer gleefully cackling at the unreliability of early cars. I believe we both know how THAT turned out. Given that Walmart was doing inventory on all its socks by walking past the socks with a wireless reader 10 years ago I'm pretty sure even your can of baked beans will have a chip in the label before long and your self checkout experience will be literally consist of solely being asked to pay for the goods in your cart. At this point paying an entire body to baby site each transaction would be wasteful and silly as 99% of them will consist of you touching a button on your phone or on store hardware to pay.
You say that self checkout is "ageist" in an era where even people turning 60 years old today probably saw a computer by the time they were 30. In 10 years this will be true of our 70 year olds. Are we just supposed to pretend that people who didn't have a phone shoved in their hand at 5 can't learn? That would seem in itself to be ageist. The reality is that old machines sucked pretty badly and older people don't like change and have taken their impression from older machines. This isn't the same thing as being incapable. For those that truly do have difficulties it ought to be sufficient to have staff on hand to help.
There is fundamentally no difference between waiting in line 2 minutes patiently in line and standing at a self checkout while the attendant helps others there for the same duration but people don't seem to react the same at all. In fact properly regarded what having 4 self checkouts with one attendant instead of 1 cashier with one computer is the probability of waiting far less.
Would you rather wait behind 3 other people or would you rather checkout out immediately and wait 30 seconds if you need help with the machine?
The Walmart near me closes opens self checkouts based on demand. So when the store is crowded, all self checkouts are open and there is a line. When the store is not crowded, half the self checkouts are closed, so there still is a line. I don't get why they would do this, but I absolutely hate it.
These kinds of jobs being replaced by software is an increase in efficiency. Those people well by and large end up doing something else that's useful for society.
A digger (machine) replaced a lot of workers with shovels, but in the long-term it has clearly been good for society.
Has it? Those gains in productivity seem to be increasingly captured by the executive and capitalist class[1]. "Society" is 90% people who have not seen much benefit to their bottom line.
When something becomes incredibly cheap to produce, it also becomes incredibly cheap for consumers. The ditch diggers had to find new jobs, but now pretty much every house in the developed world has running water, electricity and increasingly internet connectivity, resulting for an increased quality of life for everybody.
I think one way to solve it is creating institutions that invest in the job cutting technology on behalf of workers. This way workers pick up the productivity gain and not the businesses that employ the technology.
It would be a massive shake up and would seem very seizing the means of production in a indirect way though.
The graph would very heavily depend on definitions, wouldn't it? Such a sharp change should easily be tracked down to a specific event. The entire economy doesn't just decide to to things differently in sync without an external factor. So, what happened at that time?
To be fair, looks like the graph starts to flat-line in 1972-1973. I think that lines up with Nixon leaving the gold standard in 1971 and going to China in 1972. It's possible that globalization may have ended labor scarcity in the U.S. and thus labor has no leverage to capture productivity gains.
| Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do.
And now accountants have a much greater ability to keep track of a firms financial health, allowing them to grow more efficiently!
| Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common.
And hence forth came executive assistants, who could focus on more important features of their job such as managing a calendar rather than retying memos!
| Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software.
And now graphic designers can produce amazing movies, the complexity of which would dumbfound animators from the 1930s!
In almost all your cases, the productivity of these positions has grown, enabling more efficient use of their time and resources. Sure, it's required to know how to use Excel, Outlook, and Creative Studio to be productive in these newer jobs, but they it's precisely because we have integrated these tools into our workforce that we can be so productive. I see an analogy to asking "what are radiologists going to do when the AI comes"? Sure, maybe the older radiologists who don't use AI tools may be outdated and either learn to use newer tools or retire, but radiologists are not fundamentally going away. And other positions that may outright be antiquated, it's a moral imperative to create a robust welfare and career focused educational system to ease transitions pains.
If this were a concern, unemployment would have skyrocketed after Microsoft office was released and never recovered to this day.
However, decades later, there are still secretaries who schedule meetings and manage electronic calendars, bookkeepers who type numbers into excel spreadsheets, graphic designers and publication layout experts who are versed in professional publishing software, and even accountants.
Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do.
Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common.
Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software.
There are more jobs lost silently to these kinds of developments than any factory being shut down dramatically. (for the US at least)