Imagine that it is 1950 in any major American city. You are a child spending a Saturday with your family. First, you go to the local bowling alley. After everyone’s turn bowling, there is a gentleman at the end of the lane resetting the pins. Then, you and your family go to tour the big new skyscraper. You step on the elevator and there is a gentleman sitting on a stool inside who asks what floor you want to go to. You tell him to take you to the floor with the movie theater. The old man operates the elevator and brings you to the tenth floor theater. You get your tickets from the front desk and buy your popcorn. While walking to your seat, you look back and see the shadow of a person operating the projector at the back of the theater. Now, the movie has started and your day is complete.
All three of the jobs listed in that story no longer exist. There are no projectionists in movie theaters, nor are there any pin ressertters at bowling alleys. The few elevator operators in fancy hotels are there for mere aesthetics since most elevators are self-service. The more troubling take away from this story is none of those jobs lost have created new jobs. All three of these professions are just more jobs lost to the more capable modern technology. These three jobs were the canary in the coal mine signaling the future of automation and technology and the replacement of humans in the workforce.
In 2016, President Trump won his election by promising the American people that he would protect blue-collar jobs from moving overseas and stop immigrants from replacing natural born workers domestically. What President Trump failed to mention was that most blue-collar and white-collar job loss in America was not due to jobs being replaced by other humans, but by automation. A perfect example is the Carrier factory in Indianapolis that President Trump saved from relocating to Mexico early in his presidential administration. He got the Carrier factory to stay by giving the company tax breaks. Carrier then used those tax breaks to innovate the factory with new automation, resulting in the massive loss of American jobs. The only difference was that American taxpayers paid the bill for the new technology.
The inevitable future of massive job loss cannot be blamed on whoever wins the 2020 Presidential Election, but on the massive wave of technological development coming. Forrester Research makes a conservative estimate that automation will replace 24.7 million jobs by 2027. Mckinsey Global Institute estimates that in the United States alone new technology can replace around 70 million jobs by 2030. Already, 50% of current jobs could potentially be automated. Automation replacing people is not a tentative future, but a long process that is currently affecting Americans. According to the BBC, 260,000 American manufacturing jobs have already been automated as of a year ago. Since the end of the last century, automation has been slowly replacing American workers in production and agriculture fields.
A typical argument to technological innovation is Americans have been living with this phenomenon for such a long time, so it doesn’t make any difference. Some even argue machines that replaced humans in agriculture during the industrial revolution created new and better opportunities for human labor. The same could be said about automation on factory lines; that automation is freeing more Americans to pursue the less physically burdening white-collar jobs. The difference between then and now exists in the capability of the technology itself.
For every era in history, man has always been smarter than machines. Therefore, machines were left to do the jobs that were repetitive and did not involve problem-solving. Machines that took human jobs before were things like tractors and automated assembly lines, jobs that did not require human intelligence. Now, modern technology is proving time and time again that artificial intelligence can solve problems better than humans. Modern artificial intelligence has already bested the top human minds in two of the top problem-solving games, Chess and Go. It took humans thousands of years to think of the best strategies to win these games, but artificial intelligence beat thousands of years of human intelligence in decades. For a more real world application, artificial intelligence has already beat the best of human fighter pilots in dogfight simulations. An even closer to home example is the new artificial intelligence software that beats human radiologists in identifying breast cancer during mammograms. In the past, humans could not compete with the efficiency of technology, so humans just found tasks that required more intelligence. Now the question is, what do humans do when the technology becomes more efficient and intelligent?
This is the precipice American society now finds itself, where technology is not only more efficient than humans, but increasingly becomes smarter than humans. In the new technological age, corporations can be more productive with less humans. In 1979, General Motors employed more than 800,000 and made about 66 billion dollars. In 2019, they employed about 164,000 people but made 137 billion dollars. Blockbuster’s 2004 peak saw the company employ about 60,000 and make close to 6 billion dollars. While Netflix in 2019 only employed 8,600 and made over 20 billion dollars. Netflix put Blockbuster out of business not because they had better employees, but because they had better technology. There’s a misnomer that America is producing less. In reality, America is producing more than ever before while needing less people.
Even though presidential campaigns won’t talk about the massive wave of inevitable job loss, deep down Americans know it to be true. Ask Americans if there have been widespread mall and retail stores closing in their community and they will say yes. Then ask them why and they know it is because the malls cannot compete with Amazon. Amazon employs a lot of people, but not nearly as many as it takes to operate and supply malls and stores. Amazon cannot replace all the custodians, cashiers and security guards that are just not needed in online shopping. Truckers see the future coming with self-driving cars and a world that no longer needs them. 3.5 million Americans work in trucking and a lot of them can see their jobs gone in the coming decades. Not to mention all the Americans that work to support the truckers like the highway diners, trucking motels and rest stops, all of whom will not be needed in a world of self-driving cars. Americans have already watched call centers become automated in the past decade. Every time that a call comes from a computerized voice, take a second and remember that used to be a person’s job. So where does the country go next?
Well, first there must be truthful conversation about the future of job loss. In the 2020 Presidential Election both candidates refused to honestly address the issue at hand. Elected officials, corporations and workers need to all face the reality of the future of job loss in this country. Additionally, there has to be good leadership around issues that comes up with innovative ideas. Maybe modern technology is proving that the current societal organization is not going to work in the future. The Industrial Revolution over a hundred years ago did the same thing, destroying the feudal system in Western Countries and solidifying the middle class. That was a technological revolution that changed society and was organized in a way worked out for the better. Maybe with good leadership and honest conversation this technological revolution can work out even better