The Articles First
Here are links to three very interesting articles that relate, in a roundabout way, to the effects of technology on employment and education. I’ll try to tie them together later. Even if you have read them already, they are worth reading again. (Also take the time to read the Reader’s Comments. Often they are as interesting as the articles.)
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| Last Two Jobs in America |
The first article published in the NY Times on March 4, 2011, addresses the effects of technology on high-level jobs. Apparently, the performance of the computer known as ‘Watson’ on the quiz show ‘Jeopardy’ caused more than a few people to wonder, “What’s next?” The first example used in this article refers to something called 'e-discovery,' (law firms’ using software to examine thousands of legal documents that might take a team of lawyers weeks to research); the second example refers to the use of software to do computer chip design.
Here’s the link:
That second article, a NY Times Op-Ed by Economist Paul Krugman, discusses the “hollowing out” of the middle class:
Op-Ed Columnist: Degrees and Dollars and subtitled, 'The hollow promise of good jobs for highly educated workers.'
And that leads me to the third article, which ties into the overall effects of these technological "advances" on education—the inevitable negative feedback loop. That’s not the point raised in the article, but the inference is hard to ignore. I would have titled this piece, "Preparing A Nation for Walmart," but Bob Herbert opted for:
Colleges deliver the education that students’ demand and, absent a vision for their own futures (the essential 'spark' that ignites a student’s ambition), that’s not saying much. Students opt for fun. Colleges, competing for seats in seats, are all too willing to oblige. The inevitable result is that academic standards have eroded and most students who graduate lack, as Bob Hebert says, “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing” skills. The trend is clear; fun for all, no heavy lifting please, and college degrees to nowhere.
Paul Krugman rightly points out that the “idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.”
Getting At The Bigger Questions This Raises
I remember back when computer technology was emerging in the early 60's. A common topic was to what degree, and how quickly, computers and robots would displace workers. As it turned out, these worries were premature. As more and more people were employed in the computer industry, these concerns faded. For decades, there was a net increase in employment. Even unskilled workers could find a job in IT.
Well, it turns out our worries were justified; we just had the timeframe wrong. The efficiencies promised by technology took a lot longer to take root and, not until the recessions of the past decade enabled companies to layoff workers did it become clear that corporate America could shed jobs without adverse impact on profits. In fact, profits in many industries increased dramatically. As the economy recovers (driven more by foreign markets than our own) companies opt to invest in technology to forestall the need to rehire workers.
What has happened, in fact, is that computers, whose effects have been accelerated by high-speed communications, perform higher-level tasks formerly thought to be beyond their capabilities. The result is fewer and fewer jobs, even for those with advanced degrees. Call it the ‘Watson Effect.’
Think about this: In 1997, an IBM computer called ‘Deep Blue’ beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In the finite world of a two dimensional chessboard, this was relatively easy. Fourteen years later, an IBM computer called ‘Watson’ achieved a far more ambitious task by beating, to an overwhelming degree, the two most successful ‘Jeopardy’ players ever.
‘Watson’ consists of 2500 ‘cores’ and fills a small room, but don’t let size fool you. How long will it take for something that powerful to fit on a desktop? If ‘Moore’s Law’ applies, the answer is about ten or fifteen years. If you add the collaborative, parallel processing[1] potential of the Internet, the timeframe may be even shorter. “Yes,” you say, “but that was just a parlor trick—a quiz show.” No, it was powerful demonstration of the ability of computers to understand language and interpret complex, tricky questions. For those of you who missed it, here’s a typical question[2]:
Q. “Kathleen Kenyon’s excavation of this city mentioned in Joshua showed the walls had been repaired 17 times.”
Watson’s answer (in less than 3 seconds): “Jericho.”
In the past, computers and robots we’re employed to perform routine computations and data processing tasks. Today they are able to do much more. Think Google on steroids. Then, think of that version of Google on steroids.
Workers Twitter while Rome Burns
We keep hearing the term "worker productivity" as if this were a measure of human output—as if people were actually working harder or smarter. Politicians often applaud improvements in ‘worker productivity’ and brag about how productive American workers are. (In politics, one must always pay homage to the fiction of American Exceptionalism, no matter how out of date that notion may be.) How many times have you heard that “American workers are the most productive in the world?”
What is this statistic really telling us?
The Technology Productivity Index
I’m sure there are some people who are working harder, especially in organizations that have suffered drastic staffing cuts, but I can assure you that many more spend a significant part of their workday surfing the web, updating their Facebook pages, reading newsfeeds and Twittering, (“In my cubie … this job sux. Tx God for Angry Birds!”).
No, what the ‘worker productivity index’ really measures is the degree to which technology has supplanted people. Or, as Paul Krugman puts it, “technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.” It’s hollowing out job opportunities for the majority of the middleclass.
Did you realize that personnel costs are now just 12% of the cost of manufacturing a car? And that’s not just on the manufacturing floor. I don’t have the percentage from 10 years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was close to 50%. (I’m looking for it. Any help here?) Check any manufacturing plant today. What you see are robots, not people. The few people still employed are in engineering or behind glass partitions, monitoring the robots[3]. Personnel costs are no longer a factor in determining where to site an auto plant, markets are. We don’t outsource jobs because labor costs are too high; we outsource to build product closer to those who will buy them or to avoid tariffs or for myriad other reasons. (Only industries that still rely on thousands of skilled workers, like clothing and shoes, outsource jobs because of labor costs.)
Instead of a worker productivity index, a more accurate description would be "technology productivity index”. This would drive home the reality of most industries today—the degree to which technology is elbowing people out of their jobs.
How Does This Relate to the Quality of Education?
This part demands that you pretend you are a high school or college student with no experience and your whole life in front of you. (For the time-being, pretend also that you couldn’t find Chicago on a map. Now you got empathy!) How would you view your prospects in a country that has lost more than 6.5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000? Oh sure, you’re an exceptional student – you even know where Afghanistan is – and you intend to go into medicine or finance (neither one of which actually produces anything useful. From a business perspective, they’re expenses, not revenue.) Bear with me. I’m talking about the average student, the fat belly of the bell-shaped curve. Maybe your father or uncle worked in construction or as a machinist. Today, it is likely they are unemployed or working a job that pays much less. But somehow, your parents saved enough for you to attend a state college, or their low income entitled you to student loans[4] and Pell Grants. But, remember—essentially, you’re clueless. You don’t know what you’re going to do and you don’t have much ambition. You’ve been told that your lifetime earnings will be much greater with a college degree, and your loving parents want to see you succeed, so off you go. “I just need that degree,” you think, “That’s my ticket to the good life. And college will be a blast. And if I don’t go, then what? But, just don’t make it too hard.” Not to worry.
Students may not be sophisticated, but they can’t miss obvious signs of a declining job market. They are swimming against the tide of demotivation, spinning in the vortex of “No Help Wanted” signs. They see unemployed parents and neighbors; they see the underemployed now working part-time for $10 an hour, displaced from jobs that paid three or four times that much a decade ago. They see jobs going offshore or disappearing into thin air.
Really good students (like you) will do just fine, but the fat of the bell-curve will have a hard time visualizing a rosy future for themselves. You’ll opt for the gut courses, just to get that degree.
Why is it that today only 75% of high school students graduate from high school? Why do more girls graduate from college than boys? Sloth, you say? Grand Theft Auto? Drugs and alcohol? Yes, they contribute. But stop. What are the best motivators? Is it the prospect of a rich and rewarding life, and a belief that it is attainable if you work hard? That’s when distractions hold less sway. An imagined life, one that marries aptitude, opportunity and prestige, is what makes the difference between being easily distracted or motivated to learning. Without such a vision, you have today’s high college dropout rates. Less than 50% of male college freshman graduate.
Could a factor be that jobs that were traditionally dominated by men, like in manufacturing, have disappeared? Gender is less a determinant of success for today’s jobs. Women and men are equally adept at most jobs. In fact, I can think of many reasons why men may not perform as well, like stereotype-conflicted self-esteem, masculine expectations and testosterone (born out by my own observations in business.)
So, here you are; your male mentors are shuffling around complaining life is unfair and it’s all those Republicans’… Democrats’… Bankers’ … Socialists’ … Corporate elites’ fault, but, at the same time, your parents expect you to ignite that spark of ambition that will launch you into a really high-paying career. “Doing what?” you ask. “Well, something will come along… some exciting new technology like the Internet or renewable energy will light your fire.” Trouble is, on a macroeconomic level, those new technologies are likely to hollow out more of the middle class by elbowing aside more workers. Think about the effects of the Internet on retail, where a website can eliminate the need for retail outlets and the function of bricks and mortar is reduced to marketing, useful for driving people to a website. Don’t think Apple builds stores to sell computers. They build them to sell image. Most people buy technology on the web.
While I agree with Paul Krugman's analysis, I’m not ready to accept his solutions. I think expanding education opportunity; collective bargaining and tax reform (where the rich pay a greater share) will only take you so far. They’re stopgaps, necessary, perhaps, but not farsighted and, in today’s political climate, not very realistic. Looking further into the future, it's hard to imagine how 7-9 billion people will be productively employed.
In the 50s, the question about where the explosion of computer technology might lead was academic; today it’s anything but. Is the workforce doomed to be unemployed or underemployed? If you look at the trends of the last 60 years, and in particular, the last decade, it’s hard to conclude otherwise. We read about Americans loosing high-paying jobs who are now either unemployed or working for $10 an hour, without benefits. The underemployment[5] rate in the US is about 18%[6]. We read that real wages of middleclass workers (adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant for the past 10 years. Is work becoming obsolete? More and more of our nation’s resources are being directed towards projects that will increase the wealth of a few, with the unintended consequence of impoverishing the many.
What’s the Endgame?
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| Nice Ride, but where are we headed? |
The pie is shrinking. What’s left of the pie is being consumed by those who own a seat at the table. The rest are left fighting over the crumbs. I don’t intend this to be a political diatribe railing against wealth or dividing the world between the haves and have-nots. Circumstances are accomplishing that all on their own, people are just doing what people do. This is an attempt to understand the factors at work: to understand trends over a span of decades and what they tell us about the future. I don’t blame those who have been successful and find themselves on the winning side. I’ve been more fortunate than I could have ever imagined. It’s just that the long-term consequences are likely to be very ugly if we don’t figure out where we’re headed.
The stark reality is this: If you are not in a position to control the production of wealth, you will be out of a job or minimally employed to the degree that you make just enough to consume what’s necessary to keep the engine running—for most of the middleclass, that means running on idle.
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[1] That is, where many processors are working on the same problem and information at the same time. They could be arrayed in a rack in a signal room, or spread out of the Internet.
[3] And if you want to see the future, check this out: http://www.flixxy.com/high-tech-car-factory.htm
[4] Loans you may never be able to pay back… but that’s another story.
[5] The unemployed, those who have given up looking and those who have taken part-time jobs just to make ends meet.
[6] The official unemployment rate includes only those people who have been actively looking for a job in the past four weeks.
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