Dear Commons Community,
If we can sift through much of the mud during the current presidential campaign, one of the really important issues is jobs and unemployment/underemployment. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in their economic policy proposal this week focused on what they would do if elected to create meaningful, well-paying jobs. David Ignatius, opinion writer for the Washington Post, had a piece yesterday stating that the real employment issue for many workers in the not too distant future is automation and robots replacing workers on a large scale. Here is an excerpt.
“Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States — driven not by foreign competition but by advancing technology.
A look at the numbers suggests that the country is having the wrong economic debate this year. Employment security won’t come from renegotiating trade deals, as Donald Trump said in a speech Monday in Detroit, or rebuilding infrastructure, as Hillary Clinton argued in Warren, Mich., on Thursday. These are palliatives.
The deeper problem facing the United States is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and “machine learning” systems.
The political debate needs to engage the taboo topic of guaranteeing economic security to families — through a universal basic income, or a greatly expanded earned-income tax credit, or a 1930s-style plan for public-works employment. Ranting about bad trade deals won’t begin to address the problem.
The “automation bomb” could destroy 45 percent of the work activities currently performed in the United States, representing about $2 trillion in annual wages, according to a study last year by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. We’ve seen only the beginning of this change, they warned. Currently, only 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated, but 60 percent of occupations could soon see machines doing 30 percent or more of the work.
The McKinsey analysts sharpened their argument in a paper released last month. Their estimates, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering more than 800 occupations, draw a shocking picture of the future. In manufacturing, 59 percent of activities could be automated, and that includes “90 percent of what welders, cutters, solderers and brazers do.” In food service and accommodations, 73 percent of the work could be performed by machines. In retailing, 53 percent of current jobs could be lost.
White-collar workers may imagine that they’re safe, but that’s wishful thinking. If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, 66 percent of jobs in finance and insurance could be replaced, the most recent report says.”
In October, I have a new book coming out, Online Education Policy and Practice: The Past, Present, and Future of the Digital University, in which I speculate on the very same issue as applied to college teaching. In two of the chapters on the future, it is likely that much of what we (faculty) do, will eventually be phased out or at least significantly augmented by computer software. The tricky part of this is not whether it will happen but when – 10, 20, 30 or more years from now?
Tony