2023-01-26

Automation is coming for your (professional) job next

I grew up in the 1970s. The zeitgeist then was the battle between skilled manual labour and capital. The miners, the steelworkers, the power workers, the railway workers, the guys who worked in car factories were all in a life-or-death struggle with the managers, who tried to represent the providers of capital to the businesses (or, when these industries were nationalized, the government, especially the Conservative governments of Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher).

The position of both sides was reasonable. The workers wanted to maintain their incomes in real terms (inflation was raging), the capitalists didn’t want to see their investment go to zero, and the government wanted to avoid the endless tax increases that would have been required to maintain pay levels.

The villain of the piece wasn’t the evil intent of the participants. It was the forces of globalization and technical progress. Oil had a greater energy density than coal, was easier to transport and was much, much cheaper to get out of the ground. Labour in what was probably still called “The Third World” then was delighted to exchange subsistence farming for factory work at a fraction of the cost of a British Leyland production line worker. Some industries (like coal) had been in decline for half a century or more, but the rapid growth of the overall economy since WWII had meant that there was always a strong demand for the sorts of skills that miners brought to the job market.

The media presented a diversity of views, but generally was unsympathetic to the plight of the redundant factory worker or unemployed bricklayer. The feeling was, I think, that they simply needed to learn a new skill, maybe as an insurance salesman, to return to the workforce. The print and broadcast journalist was in demand and well paid.

Things are not so rosy now for the reporter, or for the accountant. It seems quite likely that technologies like Chat GPT will be able to churn out pretty good copy on any topic under the sun within a fraction of a career lifetime. Soon after, the physician and the lawyer might face the prospect of their jobs being taken by a sentient and plausible AI bot.

I wonder what the reaction will be. It seems likely that there will be a fight every bit as fierce as that waged by Arthur Scargill against this sort of technology, although it’s hard to imagine journalists showing the same sort of solidarity that the miners did (even though that was far from 100%). In a perfect world, we’d all work a shorter and shorter working week. In the real world, it always works out that a bigger proportion of the population is forced to become economically inactive. Going on the dole is not a pleasant prospect. I’m sure some geeks are going to jeer and say “learn to code.” The problem is that AI is already starting to automate program writing. There is no hope for any of us!

With that cheerful note, I’ll sign off. I was hoping to get Chat GPT to write today’s post, but the servers are overwhelmed with demand. I hope this not a sign of things to come.