Innovation and a jobless recovery
Will joblessness be a permanent condition of the apparent economic recovery? The employment picture does not look bright, based on an item in the Huffington Post by Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, computer engineer, and author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future.
Ford begins with a look at a prediction in Salon (”Why Dilbert is doomed: The jobs of tomorrow are not what you’d expect“) that the stable jobs of tomorrow in the US will be ones that cannot be offshored or automated–ones that require creativity or proximity, with the latter including healthcare and education. Ford points out, however, that neither healthcare nor education is immune to automation. Online education is becoming commonplace, and many healthcare tasks (diagnosing depression, for example) can be performed by expert systems.
Ford describes an employment pyramid with a small number of skilled professionals and entrepreneurs at the top, while the vast majority below the apex performs routine, repetitive tasks. Automation, he says, will consume the entire base of the job-skills pyramid. People in that base will need to move up or be forced out.
He doubts that most people will have the ability to move up. He adds that people with the creativity, talent, or personality traits to be successful writers, performers, and commission sales people exhibit a power-law income distribution, which leads to drastic income inequality.
Ford sees a future of job-sharing and income supplementation for most people. In that, he echoes Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis. As I noted last summer in “Robots, jobs, and war,” Clark has written, “…the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology’s role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.”
Where do engineers stand in this picture? Engineering is not immune to automation. I’ve written much over the past few months about the model-based design tools and hardware-in-the-loop tests that drastically cut down on the amount of time-consuming low-level programming and hardware prototyping that engineers need to do. To stay at the top of Ford’s employment pyramid, engineers will need to exploit the new tools available to them to develop products that represent significant innovation and creativity. (Surly the iPad can’t be the pinnacle of engineering prowess.) Marginal improvements aren’t going to cut it.
Finally, for a look at hot jobs in the near term, see “Math, science jobs rank as some of the best positions in 2010.”
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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach commented:
This post supports what many are saying -- that the jobs of the future will be for people who contribute their unique combination of skills and creativity to meet innovation. Take a read of Daniel Pink's book: A Whole New Mind. Very interesting.
BobsUrUncle commented:
When the British Empire was at it's height, it kept it's industrial base in England. It didn't 'outsource' it's manufacturing base to India, China, Africa or any of it's colonies. Ofcourse it robbed those colonies of all their natural resources and wealth, but that's not relevant to this point. If the American's want to preserve their post WWII empire, they need to act more like the old British.
Big Picture commented:
Sounds like Mr. Ford has a grasp of the obvious. Fortunately, innovation is not always obvious. The jobs and workforce of today could very easily morph based on yet to be determined developments.
The synopsis of this ‘pyramid’ can describe most of human history. But the ‘pyramid’ expands and contracts based on population. Those who want to work will always find work.
Basically, this sounds like elitist drivel from someone who can’t see past 5 minutes ago.
CH Tung commented:
People are there to create. Robot are there to execute. The value of employee, in the not so far future, is to create new things. I agree with the author.
Erik Wassenich commented:
If you use robots, you need people to maintain the robots. As long as manufacturing stays in the US, there will be jobs. The federal and state governments must give incentives to companies to stay in the US and penalize companies that outsource. Too many companies like China and India and are happy to have their technologies stolen. Profit will not decrease when manufacturing in the US. There is absolutely no advantage to outsourcing.
Meredith Poor commented:
While it might be possible to automate robots maintaining robots, the most likely scenario is that robots have to be set up, administered, and overseen in the field by some sort of attendant. Thus there will still be a janitor in office buildings, but the janitor will tend to see to the robots: keeping them charged, repaired, programmed, supplied, etc. Sigificantly, there will be only one person, rather than a staff. Machines invariably do weird stuff, so someone will have to be paying attention.
