Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines

Jamie Merisotis

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780795353482
• eBook ISBN: 9781948122603
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

A public policy leader addresses how artificial intelligence is transforming the future of labor—and what we can do to protect the role of workers. 
As computer technology advances with dizzying speed, human workers face an ever-increasing threat of obsolescence. In  Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines, Jamie Merisotis argues that we can—and must—rise to this challenge by preparing to work alongside smart machines doing that which only humans can: thinking critically, reasoning ethically, interacting interpersonally, and serving others with empathy.
The president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, Merisotis offers a roadmap for the large-scale, radical changes we must make in order to find abundant and meaningful work for ourselves in the 21st century. His vision centers on developing our unique capabilities as humans through learning opportunities that deliver fair results and offer a broad range of credentials. By challenging long-held assumptions and expanding our concept of work, Merisotis argues that we can harness the population's potential, encourage a deeper sense of community, and erase a centuries-long system of inequality.

1

How Work Is Being Transformed

“So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.”

—Ruth Bader Ginsburg¹

Work is changing in unprecedented ways as technology and artificial intelligence take over more of the tasks people used to do. It’s not simply that smart machines are doing things people cannot or will not do. It’s that they are doing things with people to help people do what they do, as humans, better.

This is the lesson Joel Lewis learned as an assembly line worker in the American Midwest. Lewis’s story is not uncommon when it comes to manufacturing jobs and robots. But unlike a lot of what’s published about how robots are affecting work, his experience is not about robots replacing human workers even as robots keep getting smarter.

Lewis began working at Cummins Inc. on an assembly line, putting in ten-hour shifts stuffing pistons into diesel engines for Dodge Ram trucks. Twenty-two years later, he has seen the assembly process at the Indiana-based manufacturer of power generation and diesel engine products transformed by process innovation and new technology.

“I see change as a good thing,” Lewis said. “We need to be able to work smarter, not harder.”

Lewis has worked in a variety of assembly and testing roles at Cummins in plants in Columbus, Indiana, the company’s corporate home, and in Seymour, about a half hour south of Columbus on Interstate 65. And he’s had a lot of coworkers, including some new “colleagues” in recent years: the company calls them collaborative robots, or “cobots.” They are smart machines made possible by advances in sensor technology and artificial intelligence that allow robots and human workers to share the same space—literally working side by side.

Cummins had deployed cobots in fourteen of its plants by the fall of 2019, with the objective of having the machines in nineteen factories by the end of that year. Cummins’s intent is simple—to make life easier for human workers, not to get rid of them. “The whole idea is to have the robot work collaboratively with the human worker,” said Elizabeth Hoegeman, the company’s executive director of manufacturing engineering. The cobot, she said, is “working in the same workspace and doing things that are less appetizing to the worker.”

For example, the cobot can perform any type of labor that offers ergonomic challenges, such as having a worker bend over repeatedly to pick up a box. Machines can also do work that might expose a human to potentially harmful chemicals. “Your only limitation is your imagination” when it comes to designing roles for the cobots, Hoegeman said.

Cummins consults with its factory workers to define roles for the cobots. Sometimes the workers offer suggestions for how manufacturing processes can be improved, and other times the comments are more personal, Hoegeman said. “One worker might say, ‘If I don’t go home with back pain, I’m happy.’” The human workers help the machines learn their functions. By taking over dull-and-dangerous repetitive tasks, cobots allow human workers to concentrate on the higher-level and more creative elements of the work.²

As his workplace has changed, Lewis, now in his late 40s, has gone through several phases of training and retraining. And he’s also trained other workers. He said many workers are initially intimidated by the changes, but they can be persuaded the changes are worthwhile if they produce benefits for the workers.

Does Work Have a Future?

“Joel Lewis and the Cobots” sounds a bit like an ominous science fiction novel. But does Joel Lewis and his experience represent the end of work as we know it, or a new beginning?

I can’t say I have read everything that’s been written about the future of work, but I’ve read a lot.³ It’s hard not to—the topic continues to fascinate journalists, futurists, and even philosophers.⁴ While the topic covers a lot of territory, many if not most of these articles and books focus on the effects technology is having on all types of jobs—not just in manufacturing—and how artificial intelligence will eliminate many of these jobs and dramatically change the rest in the near future.

Technology’s advancement and the exponentially increasing capacity of computing technology have been well documented. This pace is likely to continue or even accelerate. In 2019, Google reported a true breakthrough in computing capacity using a quantum computer.⁵ The speed associated with quantum computing is vital to the success of machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Artificial intelligence—AI—is indeed different from the technologies that constantly transform our society and economy. Throughout human history, from the most primitive tool to the most complex industrial robots, technology has extended the reach of what people can do. As technology advances, it has taken over countless tasks people have previously performed—just as it has done at Cummins. It always has and always will. Quantum computing is just the latest example of how technology can alter the pace of tasks in ways that were inconceivable even in the recent past.

But AI represents something new. As the name implies, AI is about thinking—the most human of activities. The automation of thinking, in the opinion of many, will change our economy and society as much as any technological shift humanity has experienced. Klaus Schwab, the economist and World Economic Forum founder, calls the period we are entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution and predicts that, as with revolutions that came before, it will disrupt work and employment for most people around the globe.⁶

Many reports about the future of work focus on the idea that vast numbers of jobs will disappear soon because of AI. Here are several of the more breathless claims:

• “Half of all U.S. jobs could be eliminated.”⁷
• “Accountants have a 95% chance of losing their jobs.”⁸
• “Automation threatens 800 million jobs.”⁹
• Or perhaps the most extreme view: “[The claim that 99% of all jobs will be eliminated] may seem bold, and yet it’s all but certain.”¹⁰
• Even actor Martin Freeman says, “CGI in films is so advanced actors could soon be ‘rubbed out.’”¹¹

I could go on. The most reliable headline about the future of work is that it will include the loss of many jobs, and no one’s job is safe. Indeed, some people who study the future of work have concluded we must prepare ourselves for a future without work, in which a universal basic income replaces employment and people do something with their lives other than work.¹²

I believe the preoccupation with job loss in much of the writing about the future of work is misplaced. These stories spin the (not very compelling) tale of a zero-sum economy. Much more complex outcomes are likely than simply “truck driving will disappear” or “everyone needs to learn how to code.” Those oversimplifications mask the broader patterns at play.

No one knows how many jobs will be lost to AI. A 2018 MIT Technology Review analysis of all major studies about job loss and creation, from sources ranging from global consulting giant McKinsey & Company to the OECD and the Bank of England, determined “we have no idea how many jobs will actually be lost in the march of technological progress.”¹³ So trying to keep up with the guessing game seems to me to be largely a waste of time and effort.

Labor economists have studied the likelihood of different jobs disappearing as a result of AI and automation, and their results are revealing.¹⁴ Job loss is not the whole story. Technology has always created jobs even as it destroys them, and in the past it has tended to create more jobs than it eliminates.¹⁵ Technology has caused some jobs to disappear or be transformed in ways that demand new and more advanced skills, but we also know technology has created millions of new jobs for people with the requisite knowledge and skills—particularly in knowledge-intensive sectors. There is no reason to believe it will be any different this time.

The Future of Work or the Work of the Future?

Perhaps it would be better if we thought less about the future of work and more about the work of the future. In this sense, it’s not helpful or correct to frame the issue as job loss. It’s really about job change and displacement and how we prepare people for an inevitable future in which they need to be more flexible, adaptable, and prepared for whatever opportunities present themselves. What’s more important than whether a particular job will go away is that everyone will see jobs changed in some way by technology and will need additional learning to take advantage of the opportunities for work that inevitably will be created.

Take the financial services sector. With AI and automation inexorably replacing human tasks when it comes to data analysis, many people believe “machines are becoming a threat to warm-blooded number crunchers worldwide,” according to a 2019 Bloomberg analysis.¹⁶ But job-search companies report many of the same banks and investment houses in which smart machines have supplanted human data analysts are now actively seeking people with different skills to develop stronger information systems, do ever more sophisticated data analyses, and, in effect, manage the robots. At these organizations, data scientists are in high demand.

Seth Jayson, senior analyst at the financial insights firm The Motley Fool, makes the point clearly. “Big companies in the U.S. are actually looking for liberal arts type of graduates because they want people who have a broader background than just a narrow set of skills that you might get out of finance or something else,” Jayson said on a 2019 podcast. “And you can always move into the finance area from other fields. I mean, look at me. I was an art history major.”¹⁷

Another, more concrete example of how jobs are being transformed is that of bricklayers. (Pardon the pun.) A new robotic bricklayer can lay three times the number of bricks as a skilled human worker, and, as some articles about this smart machine note, it doesn’t stop for water breaks or join a labor union. But even the inventor of the robotic bricklayer says its purpose is to make better use of human workers and not replace them.¹⁸ Bricklayers are still needed to set up and guide the machine, read blueprints, and do the more complex or tricky parts of the job, including tasks that require creative solutions.¹⁹ The same dynamic is playing out in job after job across the world economy.

Tasks, Skills, and the Future of Work

An extensive Vanguard Research study of the forces at play is revealing.²⁰ Rather than focus on jobs, the researchers looked at the underlying tasks making up jobs in the top hundred occupations in the United States and classified them as basic (requiring few skills and little or no training), repetitive, or “uniquely human.” The latter category includes the kind of tasks I am talking about—those requiring “an adaptability to situation and circumstance that can’t be codified.” This is human work that smart machines can assist with but can’t take over.

Unsurprisingly, jobs made up primarily of tasks that fall into the second category, repetitive tasks, are at the greatest risk of automation. What is more interesting in the research is that the composition of tasks in occupations has changed dramatically in recent years, with a rapid increase i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Human Work
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 How Work Is Being Transformed
• 2 The Work Only Humans Can Do
• 3 Preparing for the Work of the Future
• 4 Credentials for Human Work
• 5 Earning and Learning
• 6 Human Work in a Democratic Society
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author