Will tech companies self regulate to minimize job loss?

Emerging opinions on what to do about automation tech and its unintended consequences.

At yesterday’s Code Enterprise conference, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner stated that five million jobs across the world’s developed economies would be lost to automation by 2020 adding that tech companies “need to be really thoughtful about what we’re going to do about it.” In fact, he was a bit off. According to the World Economic Forum report he was citing, the actual job loss is expected to be closer to 7.1 million. Two million jobs will be created in that interim, offsetting the number.

And, in reality, that number is conservative. The WEF report, released in January of 2016, does not factor in upcoming technologies that may impact such predictions significantly, namely automation of commercial trucking — which feeds 3.5M middle-class jobs in the United States alone. Forrester Research calculates 7% net job loss in the U.S. through 2025.

So it should be a growing concern.

And Weiner is not the first CEO to bring the topic up, although companies seem to be decidedly split in their assessments of what the future holds.

GE’s Jeff Immelt has far fewer concerns over the future of automation and its impact on the workforce, believing that industrial robots and improvements in productivity will lead to increases in worker pay and specialization. It probably helps that GE is the largest source for many of those industrial robots. The question for Immelt is: will middle-class, and middle-aged workers be re-trained and brought along for the rise in productivity? Or will they be left by the wayside?

Going back to commercial truck driving, the average age of a trucker in the U.S. is 55, with fewer millennials interested in the daily monotony of 8-hour driving shifts. According to Flexport, driver shortages are expected to increase in the coming years, and that adds just one more major market driver toward automation. There are few incentives for the trucking companies to pass on the massive safety and productivity increases that automation would bring. And it’s not feasible to expect the trucking industry to re-train millions of its workers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

Outside of market forces lies the government’s ability to regulate and slow such a shift. But should they?

Well, it wouldn’t be unprecedented.

The FAA, for example, has long regulated jobs in the airline industry. Imagine the cost savings if the service portion of United flights were automated: self-service drinks and food; safety briefs from staff before the plane doors are closed; personnel could fan out from first class in an emergency. The economics are attractive to airlines, which are always looking for ways to cut costs and introduce lower fare options. Instead, there are long-standing rules that for every 50 passengers there must be one airline attendant. Not matter how much automation we see, those 110,000 jobs are unlikely to go anywhere.

For gig-economy companies, like Uber and Lyft, automation represents the future for their companies. Their policies of keeping drivers as contractors is likely in anticipation that those drivers will not be needed in just a few years.

With such a broad range of views and expectations, it’s time for companies — both those who are offering commercial and industrial automation tech, as well as those using them — to create policies around unintended consequences.

If they cannot, then expect the government’s invisible hand to become a lot more visible in the next decade.