Every now and then as a developer you have a revelation. As someone who spends a lot of time writing automation software, one of the topics that often crosses my mind is, “What the hell is everyone going to be doing in 20 years when all the jobs are completely automated?”. And I’m not one of those wishful thinking “Everyone will be free and happy doing what they want” super optimistic hippies. I’m a realist. Hell, I’m more than a realist. I’m a darwinist libertarian. And I’ve seen first hand how much society ACTUALLY cares about it’s poor and disenfranchised. Answer: Not a whole heck of a lot.
So it is with more than a little bit of delight that I stumbled across an area of economic activity that’s not going to be completely taken over by robots (or more likely software) any time soon – competitive jobs. Or, more precisely, jobs where the “winner” – even if they win by just a hare – takes all (or most). And this, I believe, is not only where jobs will continue to be, but also where jobs will get created. Because there’s never an end to how much additional labor a company will hire in winner take all scenarios, as long as the aggregate cost is less than the total win.
I came to this conclusion working in one of these competitive areas of the marketplace – marketing automation software. And one thing that continually blows my mind is how there is ALWAYS just “one more thing” that we could do. Call me dense, but a year and a half of continually doing “just one more thing” I had my realization. Marketing (like finance) is a competitive venture where the winner – the best ad, the perfectly timed email, the most “on brand” campaign – is what makes or breaks a companies revenue #’s. And in e-commerce where everyone is fighting for market share it’s absolutely brutal.
Every day there’s something new, some new kid on the block, some new trick, some new update that changes the landscape. And the first to adapt gets a distinct advantage for a short period of time. Before the next thing happens. And the funny thing is every time companies will keep spending. And they continue to spend. From the corporate perspective this is just the cost of doing business. Running through 50 new marketing campaign in 50 weeks is just par for the course. Hell, lots of companies run that many campaigns in parallel. And guess what? It works. Because -> competition. Being on the cutting edge makes sure you don’t fall behind – which is the difference between you being in business and getting eaten up by someone else. It’s kind of like Defense Spending. It’s a necessary cost for doing business while also being a reputation signifier. So although on the whole marketing is an expensive investment, for these companies it’s a worthwhile investment – and one they will never stop spending on.
These are exactly the kinds of jobs that will never go away.
From one angle it’s kind of silly. The jobs of the future least at risk of going away are the sisyphean tasks that can never be completed. Marketing is never finished because it’s competitive nature means it’s value is continuously calculated vs. other players, and as other players adapt the environment changes, opening new opportunities, the cycle repeats. But wait, is this really a sisyphean task? Or is this the market at work?
This same process is also seen in academia (competition for scholarly work), in software, in finance, education, process management, etc. etc. In fact, any job where the idea is to CREATE something or some system and use that thing to your advantage over your competitors. Whether it’s the system McDonald’s uses to churn out hamburgers at a lower rate, a better way to teach kids, a new sales strategy or pipeline management system, or the next big discovery in algorithm design. These jobs are NOT just in tech – although they will utilize more and more tech. These jobs are actually everywhere. Or rather, everywhere that there’s a competitive capitalist market. And even better, there’s a very easy way to insure that we create more and more of these jobs -> inject competition!
Yeah, you’ve heard the argument before. Probably from an economist. But give me a couple more paragraphs to put my technology spin on it for you and see if you also see where this problem is uniquely exacerbated by the onslaught of technology.
We all know that a lot of jobs out there are simply for “crank turners”. And by crank turner I mean a job in any industry that has become “standardized”, is now static, and doesn’t see any innovation. You go in, you punch the clock, you do exactly what you did the day before, and you go home. There are a lot more of these jobs out there than people would like to admit. Jobs in protected markets, oligopolistic markets, monopolies – places without competition – are the natural places for these “crank turners” to materialize. If the market is not competitive, once a working system is in place you just repeat that process. You turn the crank. No need to innovate. There isn’t any competitive pressure to do so.
It is here that the the twisted logic of bad economic policy + technology comes back to bite us. Because technology is uniquely adapted to turn cranks better than humans.
Let’s look at an example – education. In America we have a mostly public market for education. This means there’s one large buyer for education and they already have a system in place. If you want to sell a product to education you have to make sure that it somehow improves their CURRENT system. But wait – what about all the other possible system so education (online education?) we could try out? Well, the education market is calcified by the current incumbent. So there’s no real demand for those products. And a lot less jobs for people to create and make those products. There’s only a market to optimize the current static system. And in this competition humans are highly likely to lose out to our future robot overlords.
To be more concrete, if I could build a robot to do exactly what a teacher does for 1/10th the cost I could sell a lot of them. And given the static model of education, eventually some smart engineering team with enough resources would theoretically be able to build a system to replace a lot of the elements of teaching under the current system. Because engineering is really really good at attacking and optimizing static systems.
On the other hand if the education market was continually changing this would present a process a lot more resistant to engineering solutions. If you want more jobs and job security we need less static systems,more distributed competitive systems (think competitive markets), less crank turners, and more jobs that are continually creating value on the edge of innovation. You know, doing stuff humans are good at, like creating new things, and not doing stuff robots are good at, like optimizing static systems.
From a high level it makes a lot of sense. If you protect “jobs” by setting in stone current systems you simultaneously make these systems the most attractive to automation. If you want to create a bunch more jobs, then open up a bunch more areas to competition. Less protection = More Jobs. More Protection = Less Jobs. The more areas walled off the competition the more systems that will be created to simply replace the “crank turners” who continue to operate these systems. The less jobs we’ll have. Because crank turners are replicable in software. And everybody loses. Crank turners don’t have jobs, and automated crank turner creators end up optimizing engineering solutions to sub-optimal operation models. Competitive jobs are not as easily automated because they are continually changing. And this is why competition is so important to our continual jobs crises.
Every entrepreneur is constantly inventing systems to better manage their business. And if you look around at business practices – like locking employee’s into cubicles to type of keyboards when they could perfectly perform their jobs from home in their pajamas with their dog and kids in a relaxed environment – we still need a LOT of innovation. There are plenty of jobs to be had improving our world through creation of new ideas. We need to unlock these areas by opening up more of them to competition.
Silicon Valley is at the heart of this fight. Just look at all the lawsuits flinging around – particularly in the new sharing economy and even in online education – and you’ll begin to see the problem. The reason we don’t have more jobs is because people are afraid and trying to legislate themselves a small piece of an ever decreasing pie (crank turning jobs). Unfortunately I don’t believe this is going to be a winning proposition – by solidifying the status quo they are actually making themselves MORE susceptible to automation – not less.
Thoughts?