I work in the public sector, part of what we do is to automate tasks. No one gets fired by this directly, but over time positions disappear. When people retire, no one gets rehired and stuff like that.
Sometimes it makes sense, some tasks shouldn’t be done manually. But sometimes you automate something that was better for both the employees and citizens/patients the inefficient way, because it’s cheaper. After a long time doing this, the thing that gets me the most is how I used to buy all the corporate bullshit about how things like citizen/patient comfort, corporation, employee happiness mattered more than money, because it never did when it came down to it.
Still there are perks to the job, you get to genuinely improve people’s lives, sometimes even build things that save lives, but the automation thing, meh.
This is something I've struggled with in the past too, my job is basically to put people out of a job by replacing them with software, and those people might then suffer because of it.
I've come to the conclusion that it's not a moral failing on my behalf that people might suffer as they were replaced by code, but a failing of society. There's this belief that it's a sin to work less than full time from the cradle to the grave (minus a few years either side), that if you're not working then you're a sloth, you're lazy and you get what you deserve. More and more work is being automated, but there's still this pervasive belief that everyone needs to be gainfully employed. Instead, as manual jobs become automated, as a society we should be working less hours. The 40 hour week should become 30 hours, 20 hours.
What's the point in making somebody dig holes and fill them back in (or the clerical equivalent), just to prove that they're "working" and useful? Menial unskilled labour for the sake of it is just wrong.
My goal in life is to make myself redundant, to automate my own job away. If the programmers are out of work, then maybe we've reached utopia.
> This is something I've struggled with in the past too, my job is basically to put people out of a job by replacing them with software, and those people might then suffer because of it.
I spent five years working for a small company that was a scrappy startup, especially in how they thought about technology--everything was duct taped together and barely worked--but was cheap!
At a high level, my job was to replace people with software. What I am proud of is that we didn't let anyone go, we just found something more valuable for them to do. When I started they had 4-5 people who's job was to spend 40 hours copy and pasting tracking numbers from one system to another. This was automated and they were able to move to roles that actually helped customers.
I think my (apologies for taking a while to get there) point is that you can look at digitization and automation as a cost cutting exercise to improve the bottom line or instead view it as a way to invest in and improve the customer experience. Information Technology as margin-defense is a short-term benefit, while IT as a value-driver is a long-term one.
"offensive operations, often times, is the surest, if not the only (in some cases) means of defence" --George Washington
> you can look at digitization and automation as a cost cutting exercise to improve the bottom line or instead view it as a way to invest in and improve the customer experience
Also as a way of 'getting rid of the boring bits' of a task allowing system users to spend more time on tasks that add value to the business and / or the customers.
This is the consequence of production being oriented towards people who are not the producers. In previous economic systems, what you produced was yours and the more you produced in a given interval, the fewer hours you had to put in to reach subsistence. In our mode of production, incentives are geared towards producing more and more with less and less with no natural endpoint.
> I've come to the conclusion that it's not a moral failing on my behalf that people might suffer as they were replaced by code, but a failing of society.
I mean no disrespect, and I’ve felt/feel this too, but I’m scared it falls in under the old punk saying of “the guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to”.
I worked at a company last year (specifically their RPA sector) that one of the projects we got was create a "robot" to automate certain tasks within a client.
Later after we delivered it, we learned that project alone was the reason the client cut 700 low level positions. A single "robot" could do in an afternoon what 700 people did in a week. (Was/is a pretty large company.)
The words from my manager still echo in my mind: "If we think of the "ethical" aspect of it, we wouldn't have our own jobs."
The problem is not that jobs get automated away. Efficiency in of itself is a good thing.
The problem is that the gained efficiency is often not used to improve the lives of all (former) participants: There is little responsibility towards employees and customers. Businesses are not seen as communities, neither by employers nor by employees.
Leaders, owners, investors, employers and other powerful actors profit disproportionally, because their decisions are not tied to a holistic responsibility but only to financial metrics (which are also directed by them; a whole other problem).
There are also actors with higher (or sufficient?) ethical standards that will invest efficiency gains like you describe to educate and train their employees or at least give them the financial means. This inspires loyalty and trust.
I don't have a moral dilemma about my work cutting those kinds of jobs; it's busywork, their existence doesn't improve humanity. We're better off with something like UBI than paying people to do boring stuff that they don't really need to do.
I'm not saying it won't be the right move eventually, but that was 700 people who were getting paid for busywork who now aren't. Today I'd say there's still a dilemma.
If you apply the reversal test, the question becomes, in a world where these busywork jobs didn't exist, should we create them?
Or, taking a step back, if you ask "how many busywork jobs should there be?", it would be surprising if the answer is "exactly the number we have right how". So it seems either you should want to eliminate busywork jobs, or create more of them.
To me the "dilemma" smells like status quo bias.
I will say though, status quo bias is not all bad, there is some value to stability, but I'm not convinced it is the role of businesses to provide stability, that seems like a role for government.
It wouldn't be surprising if the dynamics of the human society pushed the number to the current number as being optimally stable for society. Too few busywork jobs and you have large crowds of protesters; to many busyworks jobs and the sectors of the economy that are growing in response to new opportunities are starved of labor. Not really stating a belief but just want to point out that in complex homeostatic systems it there are often dynamics pushing certain numbers to where they indeed are. Certainly true for body temperature and blood pH but no reason in principal not to be true of certain things about economics either.
Society and people's jobs / skills can be shifted rather more easily than bodily systems, though. Just look at the difference in the average day's tasks from 1820 to today.
Provide the right kinds of support, retraining, or yes, UBI, and we're no longer talking about people going hungry when they lose a menial RSI job. We're talking about people whose struggle to make ends meet can change into doing something that feels like a step up in the world.
Having the means to choose your employment is a HUGE thing for a lot of people. Been there, and I can feel the huge weight off my shoulders knowing that if for some reason my current job goes away, that I am certain I can find something comparable.
>> isn’t it better that everyone can type their own reports and check spelling and grammar themselves via code?
> It is...
Is it really? Seems like an awful lot of stuff just doesn't get checked any longer. The "checking" done by MS Word et al is no substitute for the eye of a skilled human.
I strongly agree... but we don’t have UBI. So for me it’s still a moral dilemma. That person is still out of a job and might be out of a job for a very long time if the economy is weak. Yes, there are answers to this problem like UBI, but as someone living in the US I can’t honestly say I can see it being implemented here any time soon. So my work has the potential to devastate someone else’s life.
(and yes, I know, I know, if I quit someone else will take my job and it’ll all happen anyway. Doesn’t mean it isn’t still a moral dilemma)
That’s a very easy thing to say when you’re not the one on the receiving end of these “transient problems”, though.
Would you tell a homeless person to their face that their poverty is a shame but it’s the price we need to pay for progress? And that you don’t know with any certainty when positive change will happen?
I have another argument that might be more convincing for you: automation makes things cheaper, so by definition it creates wealth for society. Now, you can argue that said wealth is unfairly distributed - and indeed wealth distribution itself is a thorny subject. But it is also a completely orthogonal one! I don't think we should stop from creating wealth until we find a "satisfactory" way to distribute it.... That feels like it would be a very bad idea to me.
There's a difference between being needlessly cruel and believing something is necessary and good, despite it creating some problems for some people for a while.
It feels analogous to ripping a person off of life support while saying "some day, you'll get an organ transplant. I prefer that to keeping you alive mechanically, strapped to a bed."
I wonder sometimes, in particular with smaller construction jobs. Work that can be done either by an overweight guy in a Bobcat, or a shovel crew of five to ten, in about the same time.
I wonder if the Bobcat is really that much cheaper. And the construction workers in photos from a hundred years ago always look much healthier & happier than the guy in the Bobcat.
Yeah, imagine a world where each employee had a team of highly trained specialists ensuring they had absolutely everything they need to do their job, and if they became sick at 2am on a Saturday, multiple people get woken up to take care of them. When the CEO parades investors around on the assembly floor, those employees are shined up, their capabilities are demonstrated, and they are showcased as the pinnacle of why their company is the best.
Low level employees would be lucky to be treated like robots.
Society was rich enough to support those 700 people, and now it's richer. Should be good news for them. It's a huge challenge getting to that point as a society, but there are also very rapidly evolving attitudes towards the problem (much more readiness to acknowledge that it is a problem, to start with.) I feel optimistic that this could be solved in the next hundred years.
Curious about how you feel about the number of people needed to farm 100 acres of, say corn, today vs 200 years ago. Was all the automation applied to that problem unethical?
Sometimes it makes sense, some tasks shouldn’t be done manually. But sometimes you automate something that was better for both the employees and citizens/patients the inefficient way, because it’s cheaper. After a long time doing this, the thing that gets me the most is how I used to buy all the corporate bullshit about how things like citizen/patient comfort, corporation, employee happiness mattered more than money, because it never did when it came down to it.
Still there are perks to the job, you get to genuinely improve people’s lives, sometimes even build things that save lives, but the automation thing, meh.