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More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
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By STEVE LOHR
Published: October 23, 2011
A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in
America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the
effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two
researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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The automation of more and more
work once done by humans is the
central theme of “Race Against the
Machine,” an e-book to be
published on Monday.
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Erik Brynjolfsson, left, and Andrew
McAfee, authors of “Race Against
the Machine,” argue in their
e-book that technological
advancements are outpacing the
human worker.
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“Many workers, in short, are
losing the race against the machine,” the authors
write.
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Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the
M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P.
McAfee, associate director and principal research
scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading
experts on technology and productivity. The tone of
alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose
previous research has focused mainly on the benefits
of advancing technology.
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Indeed, they were originally going to write a book
titled, “The Digital Frontier,” about the “cornucopia
of innovation that is going on,” Mr. McAfee said. Yet
as the employment picture failed to brighten in the
last two years, the two changed course to examine
technology’s role in the jobless recovery.
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The authors are not the only ones recently to point to
the job fallout from technology. In the current issue
of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an
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external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns
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Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People - NYTime...
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shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process
jobs — and we have a problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.
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The M.I.T. authors’ claim that automation is accelerating is not shared by some
economists. Prominent among them are Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern and
Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who contend that productivity
improvement owing to technological innovation rose from 1995 to 2004, but has
trailed off since. Mr. Cowen emphasized that point in an e-book, “The Great
Stagnation,” published this year.
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Technology has always displaced some work and jobs. Over the years, many
experts have warned — mistakenly — that machines were gaining the upper
hand. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a “new disease”
that he termed “technological unemployment,” the inability of the economy to
create new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.
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But Mr. Brynjolfsson and Mr. McAfee argue that the pace of automation has
picked up in recent years because of a combination of technologies including
robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory control,
voice recognition and online commerce.
Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are
giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human,
like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and
recognizing patterns. So automation is rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs
in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services sector, which
provides most jobs in the economy.
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During the last recession, the authors write, one in 12 people in sales lost their
jobs, for example. And the downturn prompted many businesses to look harder
at substituting technology for people, if possible. Since the end of the recession
in June 2009, they note, corporate spending on equipment and software has
increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat.
Corporations are doing fine. The companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock
index are expected to report record profits this year, a total $927 billion,
estimates FactSet Research. And the authors point out that corporate profit as a
share of the economy is at a 50-year high.
Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they observe, is
higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still the economy,
they write, did not add to its total job count, the first time that has happened
over a decade since the Depression.
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The skills of machines, the authors write, will only improve. In 2004, two
leading economists, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, published “The New
Division of Labor,” which analyzed the capabilities of computers and human
workers. Truck driving was cited as an example of the kind of work computers
could not handle, recognizing and reacting to moving objects in real time.
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But last fall, Google announced that its robot-driven cars had logged thousands
of miles on American roads with only an occasional assist from human back-seat
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drivers. The Google cars, Mr. Brynjolfsson said, are but one sign of the times. DealBook: Japanese Bankers at
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Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People - NYTime...
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As others have, he pointed to I.B.M.’s “Jeopardy”-playing computer, Watson,
which in February beat a pair of human “Jeopardy” champions; and Apple’s new
personal assistant software, Siri, which responds to voice commands.
“This technology can do things now that only a few years ago were thought to be
beyond the reach of computers,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said.
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Yet computers, the authors say, tend to be narrow and literal-minded, good at
assigned tasks but at a loss when a solution requires intuition and creativity —
human traits. A partnership, they assert, is the path to job creation in the future.
“In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even scientific
discovery,” they write, “the key to winning the race is not to compete against
machines but to compete with machines.”
A version of this article appeared in print on October 24, 2011,
on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: More
Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People.
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Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People - NYTime...
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