Why Technology Creates More Job
Groogy had always been a bit different, her clan members thought. Always coming up with ideas and trying things. She seemed to see the world outside of their norms. One day, she had an idea when the hunters returned with a small mastodon. She picked up a rock she’d been bashing about earlier in the day.
She’d cut her finger on its sharp edge. As she looked at the mastodon, she realised that perhaps she could neatly slice off a chunk of meat for dinner. Groogy had imagined a new technology into being and thus had created a new job for herself. Her clan loved the way she cut perfect steaks to roast over the fire. Groogy may have been the first butcher. And chef.
Although Artificial Intelligence, an umbrella term for a suite of tools, has been around well over 50 years, only recently has it become, through Generative I (GAI), accessible to humanity at scale. Because we view it as a revolutionary technology, it has also sparked a lot of debate, discussion and utter confusion.
One of the most promoted concepts with regard to AI is that many of the jobs we have today will disappear into the aether. AI and robots are going to change every job. Including doctors and lawyers and other white collar roles. This outcome however, is unlikely and misunderstood.
Over a century ago, German sociologist Max Weber proposed that as technologies advance, they result in an increased division of labour. He held this view through the lens of bureaucracies. His approach was that bureaucracy was the most efficient way to organise human societies and that it also fuelled technological advances.
This is a bit ironic in that a commonly held view of bureaucracy today is that it stifles innovation and thus the development of new technologies. That’s a whole other discussion.
While there are still jobs that have been around for centuries in our industrial age, plenty of new ones have come along. If you’d heard the job title of prompt engineer just over two years ago you’d not have had a clue what that meant or for which industry it referred to. Same with social media manager or content curation manager. Scrum master and so on.
What Weber also said of technology creating more jobs is that they would also tend to become increasingly specialized. Such as a prompt engineer. A very precise and specialized role. Also quite precarious because it’s unlikely to last as GAI advances.
This specialization also has a social impact according to Weber, in that increased specialization results in social disconnects when we find it harder to understand what someone does. I often have to explain what I do a s a digital anthropologist. With a good dose of self-deprecating humour too. That is so when I explain it to people, they feel it is a socially acceptable role and they can then put it into context with their own role and place in society.
Back to the topic of more jobs. When the automobile started to be mass manufactured, much of society proclaimed that millions of jobs would be lost. There were. The biggest job losses however, wasn’t humans, it was over 20 million horses. Ford’s innovation in manufacturing automation lead to millions more new jobs.
We’ve been breaking down the division of labour ever since we started to making tools that could automate or augment our roles, from stone tools to obsidian, bronze and today, silicon chips. Sometimes we don’t like this and we get into a kerfuffle. Such as the Luddites. They didn’t mind the technology, what they minded was being payed a fair wage.
The majority of technologies that come into our world with regard to work, we tend to like. Power tools in construction, phones for our digital lives. The technologies that we fear at first are those that we perceive as a threat to our social norms, customs and behaviours.
AI is such a tool because it is a revolutionary technology that doesn’t just impact the way we work, but the way we create and imagine our world of work, social lives and the aesthetic elements of culture such as art, literature, fashion and architecture. We see it as a thing that displaces us and how we make meaning of the world and our shared realities.
Industrial leaders see AI as a boon because it means less people to pay and the largest expense for most any business is humans. We like to have benefits, pensions, sick leave and be able to afford food and a roof over our heads. That’s pricey. Ever since the notion of Taylorism, business leaders and I’m one myself, have looked for efficiencies.
This creates a constant tension between the working polity and the entrepreneurial class. While not perfect, we manage this fairly well most of the time through the rule of law, human rights and bureaucracy.
The bigger the perceived impact of a revolutionary technology, especially one that may also be a general purpose technology, the bigger the fears and excitement.
I’m of the school of thought that Artificial General Intelligence, that is, an AI that is as smart as or smarter than, us, is unlikely. We may still create super intelligent machines. Maybe. Not anywhere near as soon as some propose.
What we are more likely to do is use Ai as a tool to augment us. This will result in the creation of new specialized jobs, the elimination of mind-numbing repetitive jobs and the imagining of new jobs as we make even more technological advances.
Out there in the world are some humans that are or will, because of what GAI can do, imagine new business models, products, services, new ways of organising, working and creating. This has always happened, for thousands of years throughout human history.
Perhaps the most significant changes and shifts to come as a result of AI in industry is not the technological changes, but rather a redefining and a re-imagining of the meaning of work. For many of us, our jobs give us meaning, a sense of purpose.
We went through this change as we drifted out of the fields and into the factories. The spinning jenny, the steam engine, the telephone and the PC have always resulted in a re-imagining of our purpose alongside technology.
We are there once again. And even though it’s always a bit messy and bumpy, we do figure it out.
