The Impact of Automation on Jobs
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future
Today in 1811, the first Luddite attack in which knitting frames were actually smashed occurred in the Nottinghamshire village of Arnold.
Kevin Binfield in Writings of the Luddites: “The grievances consisted, first, of the use of wide stocking frames to produce large amounts of cheap, shoddy stocking material that was cut and sewn rather than completely fashioned and, second, of the employment of ‘colts,’ workers who had not completed the seven-year apprenticeship required by law.”
Back in 1589, William Lee, an English clergyman, invented the first stocking frame knitting machine, which, after many improvements by other inventors, drove the spread of automated lace making at the end of the 18th century. Legend has it that Lee had invented his machine in order to get revenge on a lover who had preferred to concentrate on her knitting rather than attend to him (as depicted by Alfred Elmore in the 1846 painting The Invention of the Stocking Loom).
Lee demonstrated his machine to Queen Elizabeth I, hoping to obtain a patent, but she refused, fearing the impact on the work of English artisans: “Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars” (quoted in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson).
Before the 18th century, the manufacture of cloth was performed by individual workers, in the premises in which they lived. By the mid-nineteenth century, the manufacture of cotton cloth and thread was by far the country's largest industry—it employed more than 600,000 people in England.
The recent advances in artificial intelligence have led many commentators to declare that we have entered “the second machine age,” in which automation is going to impact knowledge-workers rather than blue-collar workers which were the type of workers replaced by computers before. This is not an entirely accurate description of the past, and possibly, the future.
John Diebold, “AUTOMATION-The new Technology,” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1953:
The effect of automation on the information handling functions of business will probably be more spectacular and far-reaching [than its impact on factory workers]. Repetitive office work, when in sufficient bulk as in insurance companies, will be put on at least a partially automatic basis. Certain functions, such as filing and statistical analysis on the lower management levels, will be performed by machines. Yet very few offices will be entirely automatic. Much day-to-day work—answering correspondence and the like—will have to be done by human beings.
Two years after publishing the book that popularized the term “automation,” Diebold established one of the first consulting companies advising businesses on how to adopt this new technology. An entire new industry and entire new breed of knowledge workers followed in his path. “Automation” has created a lot of new jobs and there is no reason why robots or chatbots or any future manifestation of “AI” will not create even more knowledge worker jobs—in consulting, servicing, help-desking, observing, counting, talking, analyzing, researching, marketing, selling, etc.
More important, as Diebold has predicted, but in a much larger sense, computers have altered and augmented knowledge work since the 1950s. To begin with, early computers replaced the original “computers,” human calculators (mostly women) that have already been replaced to some extent by mechanical calculators. Their work was certainly “knowledge work” and their skills and education served well those that transitioned into the new jobs of “computer operators” and “programmers.”
How about that quintessential knowledge work, that of a lawyer? Sure, we now have e-discovery leading to “armies of expensive lawyers, replaced by cheaper software.” But how many expensive lawyers were “replaced” by the advent of LexisNexis in the 1970s?
Diebold predicted that the “day-to-day work” would not be automated and what he probably had in mind was that secretaries will keep their jobs. The fact that they didn’t show how difficult it is to predict what impact computers will have (or not have) on knowledge work. They were not replaced by computers, but by managers who accepted the new social norm that it was not beneath them to “answer correspondence and the like,” as long as they did it with the new status symbol—the personal computer.
The more things change, the more they stay the same—in talking about technology and its impact on society. What changes is technology itself, in ways that we consistently fail to anticipate.