It is amazing the number of people I talk to who seem to think that the Transformation will take care of itself or it can be dealt with later or even that Technological Unemployment won't affect them. I think that many of them know better, but as a Harvard graduate recently told me, "Frankly, your ideas frighten me." I spoke with a young man who works in a public library. How on Earth can he think his job is safe? Yet, he didn't want to talk about it.
If you drive for a living, your job is terminal. We all know about the forklifts that drive themselves and many of us know about the Audi and Google driverless car projects. If you work on a construction site, you can be 90% certain that your job will be gone. If you are an accountant below the level of Assistant Controller or an A/P, A/R, Payroll, Inventory Control, Order Processing, etc. Clerk, you are actually on borrowed time. The next software release could eliminate your job.
Most of the medical profession is on the way to being automated. We have among us, Michael Barnathan, who has developed software that reads mammograms with greater accuracy than a human. If you work in a restaurant, you are probably gone, sooner rather than later. Stanford just increased their online free and automated course offerings to twelve. MIT, which has been offering free online courses for some time has just begun offering them for grade. In the next decade 90% of Professors and Instructors are gone. Watson cannot only beat almost anyone in Jeopardy, but with just a little bit of reprogramming can put virtually every legal researcher out of work.
That, of course, is just a highlight. I just got a fellow as a premium member of The Future 101 who is a database administrator and he understands that software is getting to the point that it almost programs itself. It's not that there won't still be programmers, engineers, system and software administrators. It's just there won't be nearly as many of them. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants to start exploring his options now before the situation becomes grim. Smart fellow.
The Transformation is something to fear only if you ignore it. Once we get everybody retrained and redeployed, the Golden Age can begin. However, as I said, we are headed for a train wreck of which technological unemployment is a significant piece. The best strategy is to get off the train as soon as possible. Getting as many people off the train as possible is the 'Saving the World by saving ourselves' strategy I talk about.
I have been thinking a lot about how best to explain the relationship between the Income Explosion and Technological Unemployment. Many people, including Martin Ford, Zeitgeist Movement and others, imagine that there will not be jobs for most people. While that prediction does not stand up to analysis, the explanation tends to get very mathematical. We need, and I have developed, an explanation that is concrete and straightforward.
Suppose 64 people produce 100,000 USD each doing 64 different jobs. That is a GDP of $6.4 million. Now suppose that robots and A.I. comes in and does half of those jobs. Now, 64 people can do 32 different jobs for $6.4 million of GDP, but the robots are making $3.2 million worth of stuff, so GDP is now $9.6 million.
Next, robots and A.I. come in and do 16 jobs more, so now 64 people are doing 16 jobs at $100,000 for $6.4 million but there are now 48 robots also creating $4.8 million for a total GDP of $11.2 million. This halving can go on until humans are doing just one job and robots and A.I. are doing the rest. And, there is no reason that we need to replace one human with one robot. We can replace one human with two robots. Or three robots. In fact we can keep adding robots until we run out of materials or people willing to manage them or until everyone has everything they want, whichever comes first. By doing so, at that point we are increasing robots to increase production. They do not eliminate jobs.
This does not mean that there is no problem over which to be concerned. Clearly, we can't just put the robot in one day and expect the human to move over to the new job the next. Hence, while people are retraining, there is unemployment. And the faster the jobs are being eliminated the more unemployment there will be. I will get into this in much greater detail inside The Future 101, but the principle remains the same.
Another person with whom I was speaking just wandered off, apparently troubled by the thought of this whole impending Transformation. She was worried that only a handful of technologically gifted people would work and the rest of us would become highly compensated bums. This, depending upon the Culture of Affluence, may actually happen. It will happen because the participants want it to, not because there is no alternative. However, it will be isolated; it is not part of most of our futures and it is certainly not something to be feared. Most of us, once we are redeployed, will gain great satisfaction from an inherently more meaningful productive activity with substantially higher compensation.
I see that many people have a difficult time imagining what they will do when their current profession, disappears. This is why you need to think about it now. This is why, at a minimum, you should become a subscriber to The Future 101 and spend a couple of hours per month working on your Transformation plan. You should be thinking about, 'What will be my career?', 'Where will I live?', 'What kind of laws, programs and policies do I want to prevail in my community.' There are so many such questions. You don't want them all falling on top of you someday having done no preparation. In your haste, you will almost surely make some fundamentally incorrect decisions.
In fact, as I said, when whatever you are doing stops being a job, the best situation would be if you are already doing something else. And that would be true for your friends and loved ones as well. I am perfectly fine with other people taking up the cudgel and spreading the word, making my new profession of 'pundit with a cause' their profession as well. There are literally millions of people out there who need to know what you will know.
And virtually nobody else is telling them. There are people who talk about robots and computers replacing human workers. Martin Ford wrote a book 'Lights in the Tunnel' that is available at no cost as an e-book. However, he speaks of an economic collapse, not a set of problems whose solutions lead to a Golden Age. Generally, nobody appears to be thinking it through in an integrated way. This is a dangerous situation. As I have stated, without some substantive large scale action, unemployment could reach Great Depression proportions before getting better.
However, I really don't want to scare you. What I want to do is get you to start thinking about what you will be doing in the Information Age. So, here, I will give you a quick rundown on my current estimates of the top careers of the Information Age. These are very broad categories with much granularity within them.
1) Designer: Everything, from houses to automobiles to clothing to jewelry to furniture to dishes, hand towels, draperies, etc. will be custom designed and 'hand made' by robots. Yes, computer aided design will play a huge role in the process, but mostly, people will want and will have 'a designer.' Because it is computer aided and because the standards of living will be so high, designers will range, as they do today, from middle class to the Ralph Laurens and Judith Ripkas. As is happening today, Designers will start branching out. Clothing designers will also design sheets and wall paper. Interior designers will also design automobile carriages.
2) Content Creators: From print to audio to video, from non-fiction to fiction to interactive games to music, in the Information Age 'content will be king.' In the Information Age, 10% or more of household budgets will be spent on content of one form or another. The emergence of the Cultures of Affluence will cause there to be a fragmentation of content along cultural lines. Television, movies, books, commentary will all come with a culturally friendly perspective. Even games will reflect the values of the user.
3) Social Experience Creator: From humans at the resorts, restaurants and night clubs to performance artists in the park, Salon hosts (traditionally they were hostesses), etc. The Administrative staffs of the Boutique Villages will be charged with the responsibility of making the village, not just a home and workplace, but also an artistic lifestyle and social experience. Social environments will be artistically created because that is what people like. I expect that there will be significant invention in this arena with people thinking up all sorts of Social Experiences.
4) Entrepreneur: As I have said on a number of occasions, enterprise organization charts will be eaten by robots and expert systems from the bottom up. However, near the top, it will stop not because the top jobs couldn't be automated but because we don't want them automated. In the end, humans will stay in control. Humans will make the decisions. It certainly will not be durance vile, but it will be the career. In some ways I am reminded of the Victorian Gentleman, living from the importation of goods from the global systems of colonies, who would 'go to the office' for a few hours each day. He would keep his hands on the enterprise, but his life, actually, was defined elsewhere. That period happened on the backs of colonized nations. This time, it will be robots and computers.
5) Robotic Manager: By the end of the Transformation, we could probably completely automate whole industries. However, again, we probably wouldn't want to. For example, your landscaping will probably be executed entirely by robots. However, there will still be a 'landscaper' who will oversee the process, talk to the customers and make everyone relaxed, that the robots won't do something stupid and destroy the rhododendrons. Many fully automated plants will be owned by five or six 'operators' who are on duty for no other reason than to keep an eye on their livelihood. However, since they are there, they will probably put a bit of a personalized stamp on what comes out of their fabrication facility. I imagine a tomato 'truck farm' whose produce is marketed as being 'tended to' by the owners.
6) Scientists, Inventors and Engineers: Some time after 2100 Humans may finally reach a point where there is little left to discover or invent. I'm not predicting it. Rather I am predicting that it won't happen before then - in this century. Because of the Income Explosion, essentially anyone who wants to do research will be able to get funding to do the research. I suspect that in many cultures, Polymathica among them, it will be considered a kind of obligation, as it was among the wealthy of the Renaissance, for the Knowledge Class to support the Arts and Sciences. I imagine that as much as 3% of the population may be doing research 'on patronage.'
7) Investors: It is not yet clear how the relationship between entrepreneurs and Investors will play out. We know from the articles that I have published that a passive and remote investor class will fade in significance to be replaced by visionary investors who make it a career to enable worthwhile products and services. 70%+ returns are not sustainable over the economy as a whole. It is a equity constrained growth rate that will eventually be reached only in new industries and markets. Rather, what will happen is that income from an equity in the enterprise earnings will become a more significant percent of the personal income and will be more broadly distributed throughout the population. Because of this, the Investor Class will shrink but will not disappear.
This is, of course, far from a comprehensive list. However, most readers will end up somewhere on this list of seven general career categories. How to get somewhere on that list is not intuitive. I related the story of the Sociologist who may want to become a Village Sociologist and, as such, a denizen of 3) Social Experience Creator. However, she cannot just sit around and wait for the current situation to resolve itself. She should begin doing things right now.
The same is true for most of the people reading this article. At a bare minimum, you should be creating an action plan based upon a superior knowledge of futurity. I do believe that a Future 101 premium will make that much easier. However, whether you do it with me or you do it with someone else or you do it alone, I strongly advise that you start doing it.
In the end, I am not convinced that we have the collective will to collaboratively 'save the world by saving ourselves.' It requires a degree of proselytizing, of intentional word of mouth. I will once again encourage you to use the share buttons below. I know some will share, but I haven't seen it done to a sufficient degree to believe that it might 'go viral.' In order for the 'Save the world by saving ourselves' strategy to work, it needs to go viral.
However, whether or not it works on a societal level, we still can and should save ourselves. To that end, again, I encourage you to join The Future 101 and begin a systematic process. It would be wonderful if I could find my '1,000 True Fans'. If I can help 1,000 families realize a better future, I would count that as, at least, a small victory.
Regards,
Michael Ferguson
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