As South America burns, as recession looms over the US, as the Senate Majority Leader continues to ensure that no legislation happens in the Legislative Branch, an greater destructive force is at work on us all.
That force is... automation. AI. Robots. Technology that can not only do human jobs, but do them better. And faster. And cheaper.
Robots have been creeping into US factories for years, displacing human workers; AI is now creeping just as deeply into the office, taking up mundane, repetitive tasks involving moving information from one place to another. Vehicles are becoming smarter, year by year. And the rapidly-evolving quality of AI, combined with the oceans of data now available via the Internet and cloud systems, is approaching and even surpassing human beings, when it comes to decision support.
Add it all together, and you get automation – though better to say Automation, with a capital A. Automation that has the attention of businesses around the world, as a way of speeding things up, making operations cheaper, and employing fewer of those messy, mistake-making, expensive human employees.
There are five big areas where Automation is eradicating jobs by the millions: Retail, Clerical/Administrative, Food Service, Transportation/Trucking, and Manufacturing.
Manufacturing, we all know about: for 20 years, robots have been replacing humans in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, other Midwestern states. The result has been increased suicide, drug abuse, and the election of Donald Trump.
In Retail, Amazon has been the pandemic: malls and small businesses have been decimated, and the worst is yet to come – an estimated 30 percent of existing retail stores in the US will close over the next five years. And Amazon is the biggest driver of that shift.
In Clerical and Administrative, bots and smart workflow are replacing service desk workers in all industries, back-end support personnel in banking and insurance companies, and even taking on expert roles in healthcare.
But it’s Transportation and Trucking that’s most interesting (and disturbing). That industry is pervasive in most of the others, and has supporting industries built up around it, to support the people who do that job. Trucks are rapidly becoming robotic (and Amazon, creative destructor that it is, is leading that revolution); they are not yet smart enough to replicate the performance of human drivers with 100 percent accuracy – but they have hit 98. And Silicon Valley has developed telerobotic operation (where human operators pilot trucks remotely in areas too dense for an on-board computer to navigate safely) to get vehicles that last 2 percent.
Even if self-driving trucks only work the interstates, that will obliterate the role of human truck driver (which is already in sharp decline). The transition will take 5-10 years, and will result in almost $170 billion in money saved by companies using such trucks.
All of this information is by way of Andrew Yang, Manhattan entrepreneur and Democratic presidential candidate, who spent two hours relaying it to podcast god Joe Rogan in February 2019. Yang’s platform issue is Universal Basic Income (which he calls the “Freedom Dividend” - that tests better), which he says will help push back against the technological and economic tsumani rushing towards us.
Yang’s Freedom Dividend is a simple proposition: give every citizen $1,000 a month. He makes a case that this will help shore up the rickety population that these changes will create, pushing back despair, keeping dollars churning through the economy, and giving the displaced a softer landing.
But the numbers on the far side of this Automation revolution are much worse, and Yang’s suggestion can’t do much about them.
The displaced truckers will number 3.5 million.
The supporting population – employees of truck stops, motels, etc. - is more than 5 million.
In customer support, it’s 2.5 million.
It’s 30 percent of all banking and insurance company clerical workers.
It’s 30 percent of all retail workers (the most common job in the US). The Bain Macro Trends Group projects that between 20 and 30 percent of jobs in the US will be automated by 2030. The McKinsey Global Institute agrees, saying 25 percent. And on the last day of the Obama Administration, the White House issued a report projecting that 83 percent of all jobs that pay less than $20/hr will be gone in that same time frame.
And it’s not as if it all stops in 2030. If anything, the displacement will not only continue but accelerate.
In reporting this information to Joe Rogan, Yang made the point that the result won’t just be increases in suicide and drug/alcohol abuse and depression: there will likely be violence. Exactly this kind of displacement resulted in the Industrial Revolution. There were protests, mass riots, and even deaths – resulting in the establishment of Labor Day and mandatory high school. Yang pointed out that the displacement this time around will be 3-4 times greater, percentage-wise.
And if that wasn’t enough, US workforce participation is already down to 63 percent – that same as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Suicide and drug abuse and depression are already at all-time highs.
Most of the people who stand to lose above are high school graduates without special skills. The standard solution – that they retrain for STEM jobs – is absurd, and even if it weren’t, there aren’t enough STEM jobs for that many millions of displaced workers. Truckers aren’t going to be moving en masse to Silicon Valley to start coding.
Life in the US will change more in the next decade than it has changed in the past century.
Yang’s solution is a help, but a very small one. We are facing a massive disruption, not only of the economy but the culture. What are we going to do about that?
The biggest and most difficult task is this: letting go of the outdated, ineffective frames that have built up around both the nature of economy and human beings.
Our social and political ideologies are based on many such frames – that the value of a human being is measured by what s/he produces; that sustenance is something we buy with our time; that capitalism is built on the self-interest of all parties who participate in it, and others. Even if these frames had any truth to them – which they don’t - they still will no longer function for us.
The private sector has already demonstrated that it is and will remain the antagonistic force in this diaspora. There will be no help there. Businesses have every motivation, not only to abandon their employees, but to do so as quickly as possible.
And let’s not kid ourselves, we’re not talking about a new division of Haves and Have Nots; Automation won’t bring about a new age of techno-rich, standing on the backs of the non-STEM. It will bring about a collapse. If human beings continue to be released from labor by the rise of the machine, resulting in more and more unskilled and unemployed, the economy can’t be sustained. There will simply be far too many people able to buy little or nothing. And Andrew Yang’s $1,000 a month won’t get anywhere near fixing that.
That leaves our lawmakers. The only way to protect the economy and the population it sustains is to rewrite the rules of production, compensation, and public services. We need new innovations in value-added taxation; we need to find ways, and turn them into laws, for extracting support of our citizens from the Automation replacing them. We need to push back hard against ideologies, religions and other groups that see human beings as beasts of burdens, only valued for what they produce, and replace that cynical vision with one of inherent respect and dignity for every man, woman, and child, regardless of education or skillset.
That would be daunting under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances.
We have endured almost four decades of exploitive economic policy designed to redistribute the public coffers upward; we have eroded our middle class; we have placed in the White House a vain, ignorant, talentless nincompoop who is determined to weaken if not eliminate out-right our most important trading relationships.
How, from where we are, can we ever get our lawmakers to face the coming technopalypse?
How do we drag them out of the endless obstructionism and partisan blood-letting? How do we cut through the banshee howls of the troublesome base voters? How do we stand up to the special interests and dark money that are leeching away the sovereignty of the ordinary citizen?
We are just nowhere. The truth is that we don’t have leadership in place anymore. And we need it at this moment, for the reasons spelled out by Andrew Yang, more than ever. Instead, we have a never-ending clown show. And a ticking clock. And not much road left.
We don’t have time for this shit.
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