The Gig May Save Us From The Robot

A few years ago, I watched a short video, by CGP Grey, called “Humans Need Not Apply.” In it, a compelling and depressing case is laid out for a massive shift that is happening where automation will make many jobs currently performed by humans obsolete. While this is not new or news, the facts laid out in the video really got me thinking about the very nature of human “work.” During our lifetime, we’ve pretty much assumed a “norm” of a 40-hour workweek working at a company (office, factory, store, etc.) for an organization that pays us regularly and (in many cases) provides us with health and retirement benefits. This norm also included attending public school (6–7 hour long daily classes or 30 students made up of a pretty fixed math, science, language, history/social studies curriculum) for the first 20ish years followed by a few more years of trade school, community college, university, and/or graduate school. However, is easy to forget that not terribly long ago, most work was farming or factory… education was limited, large organizations were few, work was more of a 12+ hour daily grind, and almost everyone was barely getting by.

As I considered what the future held for our society, both in the U.S. and globally, with these rapid shifts in employment patterns seem to threaten the very existence of human jobs, I almost immediately found a growing discussion around UBI… Universal Basic Income. This is the idea of providing citizen money for the basics: housing, food, and transportation. There have been some promising experiments and many interesting aspects to UBI, but it seems like a bridge too far for many. At the point that a large enough portion of the population are not employable (because automation has taken the work they have the skills for, and they don’t have the skills to do any of the emerging work), it is likely that populations begin to have significant unrest and violence (say, like the yellow vest protests in Paris recently or the GM United Auto Workers or UAW union strike that as of this writing is ongoing after a month of striking). So the question I find myself asking is, if this trajectory is real (and all indications are that it is) but we don’t like what some are proposing, what can be done to keep people engaged in work that both provides them an income required to live and provides them a reason to get up in the morning.

One option that some folks are pursuing is the worker’s rights model that unions effectively used during the industrial revolution to obtain fair wages and benefits like retirement and healthcare. Mandate that the companies benefiting from human labor reward those humans equitably. We are seeing this play out today with the UAW strike I mentioned earlier, with the pushback in many cities against Uber and Lyft, and with California’s recent law on worker classification.

Underlying this option seems to be the assumption of both a basic work model (full-time, 40-hour/week employment for a company) and a social contract (go to public school at a minimum and then you should be able to get a full-time job with a company that can support your life and a family). However, we’ve seen this model and social contract change (some might say erode) over the last 20 years. People with limited education have a hard time finding a 40-hour/week job that pays all of the bills and so many ends up having both spouses work, sometimes at 2–3 jobs, to get enough hours of low pay to support life. Simultaneously, companies are shedding and reducing benefits by shifting from pensions to 401Ks and shifting more of the healthcare insurance costs to the employees (at least in the U.S.).

But those are not the only changes going on. People are beginning to shift away from company jobs, and towards independent, freelance, and gig work. A report by Edelman Intelligence commissioned by Upwork and the Freelancers Union shows growth in freelancers at three times traditional employment. A trend that, if it continues, would result in more people working as full-time freelancers than traditional employees by 2027. What is interesting is that this trend is happening despite the difficulty of getting affordable health insurance with a company-sponsored plan. This report shows that full-time freelancers are often doing more of what they are passionate about and less of the kinds of “overhead” and “red-tape” work that they had to do when working for a large organization. In fact, the study indicates that “51% of all freelancers say no amount of money would get them to take a traditional job.” While this shift seems to be organic in nature, it has much more momentum and progress than most people and organizations realize. If you pay attention to headlines, it is happening all around us. WeWork (who provides freelancers with office space) has become the largest office space in both New York and Chicago. Uber just announced “Uber Works” where they are making it possible to hire skilled freelancers (their current drivers who it turns out to have many more skills than just driving) using their app. Many managers are now reporting that one of their key challenges is hiring people with the skills they need.

There are likely several factors behind this shift, but I want to focus on two. “Low-friction, matching platforms with access that is both global and hyper-local” and “upskilling/lifelong learning.”

Let’s start with upskilling/lifelong learning. It turns out that this trend of automating people out of job is not actually that new. Additionally, there is fairly good data to show that as technology takes over human jobs, it typically creates new jobs. A great example of this is animation artists. If you look at the credits of one of Disney’s first animated movies, Snow White, you find about 275 animators in the movie credits who collectively had hand-drawn/colored over 2 million drawings. Since then, digital animation tools have made that job so much easier than it is not a stretch to imagine that this same feat could probably be done with 5–10 animators if produced today. But if you look at one of the more recent movies that were largely digital animation, you find over 3700 in the credits. The more capable tools we create, the more we tend to do with those tools. Assuming this phenomenon applies broadly as technology advances, this would seem to counter any fears of job loss to automation. But large-scale unemployment is still a huge risk. Not because there won’t be plenty of things for humans to do, but because the mechanisms and structures that we have used for the last 100+ years to educate and train people so that they can work can no longer keep up with the rate of change in skill requirements.

In the traditional model, as new skills demands increased, those demands made their way to educational institutions over a few years. Then those institutions would take a few years to develop a curriculum to address these new skills and only then could the process of producing people with the needed skills could happen (often taking another 2–4 years). This 5 to 10-year process was effective when the rate of change (and associated scaling) was longer than 5–10 years. However, in the last 10–15 years, we’ve started seeing that this model isn’t keeping up. Add to this the fact that organizations largely relied on employees getting their technical skills through these organizations and not through the organization (business average about $1000/employee/year in training — most of which is IT, security, and safety training and does not address technology advances). The bottom line is that organizations have not adapted to the new needs of “upskilling” with the new technologies and tools needed to stay competitive and in fact, pose a barrier to most employees from obtaining those skills.

Contrast that with freelancers who, with their flexible schedules, are naturally upskilling via life-long learning. The Edelman Intelligence research showed:

• Freelancers are more likely to find skill-related training valuable to the work they do now rather than a college education.
• Freelancers are more proactively updating their skills to remain marketable as the job market evolves compared to non-freelancing workers​ — 70% of full-time freelancers participated in skills training in the past six months, compared to 49% of full-time non-freelancers.
• Specifically, freelancers are seeking training to enhance their skills in areas that affect freelancers most: technology, networking and business management.
• Cost is a barrier for many (53%) freelancers to accessing training, particularly because freelancers are more likely than non-freelancers to pay for training themselves.

This transition to increased lifelong learning is just starting (and hopefully will come quickly enough) but it seems to be coming from different places with different delivery methods than our traditional education systems. Platforms like Freelancer.com and Amazon Mechanical Turk are starting to offer micro-certifications and training on needed skills. Crowdsourcing communities like Topcoder and Kaggle or forums like StackOverflow or CodeGuru offer ways to learn the latest and greatest software and data science techniques, ask questions, and “learn by doing” via projects and contests. Khan Academy’s online repository of free online education with its “mastery learning” approach is revolutionary. The main point in all of this is if our real problem is keeping people skilled for emerging jobs, we need a new way to think about and deliver learning. We need large scale, prevalent, lifelong learning for everyone.

The second factor is “low-friction, matching platforms with access that is both global and hyper-local.” These are companies that have found ways to use digital, internet-based platforms to connect people and organizations all around the world that meet real needs in ways that are significantly better and more efficient than traditional methods. Platforms like Uber are matching people that need transportation with people that have cars and are willing to provide rides. Airbnb is matching people with an extra room with people who need a place to stay. But probably most importantly, new freelance platforms are matching freelance workers with specific skills to organizations that need work performed that require those skills. While freelancing is not new, previously freelancers had to take on all of the marketing, sales, proposals, invoicing, and collections, in addition to trying to apply their expertise to actual work. On top of all of that overhead, they were usually limited to the customers located near them geographically.

Now, enabled by these emerging, globally-connected platforms, freelancers are matched to tasks and projects all around the world with much of the administration and payment mechanisms being handled by the platform. Additionally, some of these platforms additionally provide technical communities of practice where freelancers can develop new skills or get help on projects. The number and variety of platform models for these kinds of “open” labor pools are growing. There are open freelance platforms like Freelancer or Fivvr to selective platforms like Upwork, TopTal, or Maven. There are sites that use simple listing and bidding for matching while others use sophisticated machine learning algorithms to match clients to exactly the right freelancer. Some platforms, like Paro.io, are freelancer-centric and include “upskilling” built-in by matching freelancers to projects and tasks that will challenge them to grow and improve while supporting them with the resources to ensure the job gets done right. Platforms like Topcoder (1.5 million software developer) has merged the crowdsourced contest model with the freelance model to orchestrate its crowd members in a way that can deliver complex software and artificial intelligence solutions. There are even platforms, like Samasource, that provide freelance opportunities exclusively to individuals who live in some of the poorest slums in the world as a way to provide meaningful work and a path out of poverty.

Some have described this migration to freelance or gig work as “the democratization or work” since workers have much more choice in the work they do and their access to work is not limited by organization gatekeepers that have shown to be biased and not always provide opportunities to the best qualified. While this may be the case, the more important property of this emerging labor economy is its ability to adapt and keep up with the increasing rate of change. If there is hope in the future where automation and technology are changing the work available to humans, it is this new construct. Freelancers naturally engage more naturally in life-long learning (Again, see the Edelman study for the specific data) requires in ways that have been elusive for organizations. Of course, organizations are not going anywhere. But as more and more of labor migrates to these platforms, the more it promises to force changes to traditional organizations. We may see total decoupling of benefits from employer (which we have been seeing coming for a while and may finally allow workers to move between jobs and develop skills more in line with their passions instead of staying in jobs they dislike just because it has good benefits). We will likely see organizations allowing much more flexibility for their employees to not only work remotely but to actually work gig and freelance projects as a way to keep up with the latest technologies.

We are in a race. If enough of the workforce AND work can migrate to this new model that is able to adapt to the changes brought about by automation, it is possible that unemployment and the resulting social unrest might be avoided. However, if organizations and workers cling to the eroding model of the last century, where an education in the first 20 years of life provided you 40-hour workweeks for a 50-year career, the massive unemployment, and resulting social unrest may be unavoidable. It is robots vs. freelancers that are in a race. Robots and technology are eliminating and creating jobs faster and faster. Can we move fast enough to adopt a new paradigm of open labor that will keep up? I really hope so.

— — — — — — — — — —

About the author: Steve Rader is the CEO and Principal for Crowd Resources Consulting where he lectures, teaches, and consults on open innovation and the open labor trends…as his side-gig. Steve’s day-job is with NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation where he works (and has worked for over 30 years) to leverage the benefits of open innovation across NASA and the federal government. This article is not intended to represent NASA or the federal government in any way