Afternoon Must-Read: Cardiff Garcia: Jobs, Automation, Engels’ Pause and the Limits of History
Income inequality has climbed…. High profits have not been redeployed as significantly more investment. Anecdotal evidence of remarkable new technologies suggests that the effects on the economy will be profound, but it’s not clear how…. Sound familiar?… I’m talking about the UK in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, a period that economic historian Robert C Allen has labeled “Engels’ Pause”…. The lazy-but-common retort to the idea that technological advancement would massively displace workers has long been to accuse the fear-monger of having perpetuated the lump of labour fallacy. Luddites!…
The issue is worthy of serious discussion even without perfect foresight. The place to start is by asking what’s different about current trends versus those of the past…. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne….
Technology in the 21st century is enabling the automation of tasks once thought quintessentially human: cognitive tasks involving subtle and non-routine judgment. Through big data, the digitisation of industries, the Internet of Things and industrial and autonomous robots, the world around us is changing rapidly as is the nature of work across occupations, industries and countries…
Technology is infiltrating jobs that were thought to have resided safely in the realms of human thought and interaction…. Previously, automation technology replaced human muscles and the tiny brain space needed for simple computations. Now it might begin to substitute for the squishier non-mathematical parts of the human mind. If so, then people will be running short of “quintessentially human” qualities that are useful in work. Creativity, subjective cultural judgment and empathy would still be there, but we can’t all become entertainers, art critics and psychologists….
A few points are useful to keep in mind when thinking through history’s lessons for the issue of jobs and automation. 1. The sample size provided by history is very small…. 2. To whatever extent history can be of use, its lessons are unclear…. 3. If something radically new is happening or is about to happen, there’s a chance we won’t know for sure until well after the process has started…