What is important about automation in the city is its human consequence
This short essay is inspired by “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” by Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum.
1: “What is the city but its people?”
So asks the Roman tribune Sicinius in Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s lesser-known tragedy. The line is often cited in fields surrounding urban planning, to establish what is obvious but often forgotten: That a city exists only as an armature for networks of human relationships. More and more of our modern understanding of cities affirms the same: While structures, physical systems and geography are often leading associations with cities, in their essence they are collections of people involved in common endeavors.
When contemplating the future, and specifically the future of urban technology, however, I’ve found the discussion drifts away from this human essence of the city. Conversations and articles about the sharing economy or artificial intelligence focus not on the human experience in the city of the future, but on a technology platform. A recent essay by Richard Florida, “When Artificial Intelligence Rules the City,” itemized shifts like autonomous vehicles, predictive modeling in policing and health care, but gave little consideration to how change could affect the human interaction that defines and distinguishes cities. Each area of transportation, public safety, and health care, for me trigger dozens of questions about the good and ill consequences of automation and artificial intelligence for people.
Work is another example. One of the critical functions of urban areas, and the engine of ongoing global urbanization, is employment. People move to and stay in cities to access work, better paying work, more work options. Looking forward, a 2013 study from the University of Oxford suggested artificial intelligence may in some way threaten 47% of current US jobs. The impacts will vary by sector, depending on their concentration in downtowns, other core city neighborhoods, suburbs and smaller cities; these location choices are driven by reliance on proximity, skills, or cost containment. As automation accelerates its pace, people working in different industries, in different cities, will experience the impact of automation in ways specific to their work and their region. Workers in broad job categories like sales, office and administration, and service are likely to experience the most disruption.
Take Omaha, Nebraska as an example. Omaha’s regional economy is strongest in financial services, insurance services, and production technology. Fields like securities and insurance brokerages are already experiencing automation, and the 29,000 Omaha jobs in these fields could be in jeopardy in an increasingly automated economy. On the other hand, 8,300 jobs in production technology could grow more numerous as the region’s firms design and export systems that manage automation in other industries globally. An evaluation of the region’s total employment by industry could define the current location of these jobs and explore the impact of shifts on other businesses that serve these leading economic clusters: Law firms, restaurants, lenders, construction contractors and IT firms. How will citizens, particularly those facing reduced hours or job cuts, make a transition to other viable fields and roles? How will the public interest in full employment translate to public programs that help those who lose one job to automation find another?
For some, “another” will be plural. Increasingly, workers may engage in work using networks that extend across larger and larger spaces, potentially engaging in several work roles at once. Schwab suggests a larger number of people will secure and conduct their work through a “human cloud,” where workers match their skills to the needs of organizations with little respect to location. As social creatures, generally made happier and more productive by in-person exchange, how can such an arrangement fully meet the needs of both employers and workers? Will more and more of the workforce engage in such ad-hoc employment and if so, how will the urban settings around them accommodate this trend? Using local, highly accessible spaces will need to continue evolving to match capacity to this emerging need — for people with skills in assembly and manufacturing as well as laptop types. Call it fractional employment or the Hollywood model; it probably spells great news for some and great challenges for others. One essential question for all of us will be how the least suited to the economy of the future are still included in meaningful ways at a livable wage.
By definition, cities deliver economies of scale. Physical infrastructure and systems become viable and productive serving cities because of their scale. Today, city leaders and citizens have an opportunity to respond to and generate shared benefits from automation because critical mass exists in urban areas. Job training and support for younger and older workers, in terms of access if not currently in terms of funding, are feasible at large scale in cities because of proximity and the base of skills present.
What is the city but its people? Today’s city is not a collection of structures and vehicles and spaces. And tomorrow’s city, no matter how automated, will be as essentially about networks of people as it was in the Roman times of Shakespeare’s conjuring.
