Evolution of Work and the Economies of Scare
The story of the head scratching ape to a phone scratching human is eventful with material losses on the way. Visualize this journey for a few million years and we see us losing our tails and changing the ways of our hunt from real to virtual. Plot it a couple of million years to the future and we see our necks bent forward to accommodate easy texting, arms taking the shape of a selfie stick and an augmented reality enabled retina viewing real and virtual objects in the same space. For the sake of sophistication, we call it “Human evolution”. For the sake of convenience, we believe that it is over.
Necessity is the mother of evolution. We shed our non-human functions one by one and shaped the body and mind to fit our evolving needs as the story progressed. We do not know whether we are fully human yet. We are yet to reach the end of the story. We are a work in progress.
Automation is the Industrial flavour of evolution that has been helping us reinvent ourselves by shedding the functions that we felt least exciting and less productive for us to perform. What is the next trait that we are going to let go?
It was in the news that Amazon had acquired a robotic company and have deployed robots in their fulfilment centres to shorten fulfilment times. The ongoing shed of human functions is the ability to lift and shift in the largest rain forests of packed goods that are ready for prime shipping. This is the second stage of occupational transformation triggered by online shopping that started with the creation of more delivery boys and less cashiers.
All these transformations came to the shores of our lives like Tsunamis. They were the ripples from the quakes of business paradigm shifts. At each of these advents, a section of the community was economically impacted. This phenomenon is so painful. These changes need to be predicted and crisis managed to avoid disruptions to livelyhoods. Governments need to proactively prepare for the next big wave as soon as the quake take its birth in the oceans.
The world population in 1947 was around 2.5 billion. This was the year Ford established an “automation” department. It was after this establishment that the word “automation” came into being as a widely-used word. That means there were 2.5 billion stomachs existent in the world when the word automation assumed its utilitarian existence in the popular vocabulary. Let us assume there were jobs for a significant population of adults in that 2.5 billion which kept them and their families fed. Currently, we have around 7.5 billion stomachs to be fed, and there still are occupations in similar proportions or better. The tummies have only increased in size. One would assume that buying power has almost tripled from that time. So, what has this automation done to all the occupations? Why is this ubiquitous influence of automation not doing its job of killing jobs? Isn’t it because these evolutions have enabled us to venture into newer dimensions?
Automation appears to conquer into the “intelligence” space of humans with advancements in artificial intelligence. “Learning” and “Problem Solving” are some of those cognitive functions that humans associate with other human minds. As the time goes by, more of these functions get added to the Artificial Intelligence list. These will be eventually taken away as jobs that we stop doing. The less we start doing those less human stuff, we become closer to our destination of being more human. More time for music, reading, entertainment, more time to invent and to do things that we have not explored yet. Next set of occupations are waiting to be re-imagined.
It will be hard to predict if man-machine marriages will be legal in 2050. In any case, tomorrow is going to be more romantic with both of them becoming more synergised and more “human” collectively, venturing into arenas that are new to both of them. Highly cognitive spaces like creative arts and entertainment would be the ones that would keep humans engaged, thereby creating opportunities. And there are technology centric jobs that keep the machines alive and productive by programming them, servicing them and expanding them as well. Symbiotic evolution of both the man and the machine are creating only more and more functions to cater to, not less.
