Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

What I don't think gets mentioned enough in these discussions is Jevon's Paradox[0], which can be summarised as:

> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes the Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.

Or more cynically: when increased efficiency creates greater demand than that increase in efficiency. I probably don't need to convince anyone here that this happens in real life all the time - we're all familiar with Wirth's Law[1], right?

So I think the same applies to automation and work. If anyone hasn't seen "Paperwork Explosion" by Jim Henson (you know, the guy who made The Muppets and the original voice of Kermit, and Ernie), this is a really good time to do so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk

Look at what IBM promised: freedom from administrative woes! We can go back to do real productive work! Essentially exactly what we're hearing now. Now compare it to what actually happened. At the last two universities I've worked I have seen a lot of “the administration department is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding administration department” in action. At the expense of the quality of education and science, I might add.

Buurtzorg Nederland[2] got a lot of attention in recent years for breaking that trend with its simple approach to letting nurses self-organise as independent, self-managing teams (so what Agile tried to be I suppose, except for nurses). What is often overlooked is that this is basically just going back to the model that the Netherlands had up until the 1980s, but a bit enhanced with modern information/communication technology. Jos de Blok, who founded Buurtzorg, briefly that in this short TED talk[3], but my parents were both general practitioners until they retired a few years ago confirmed that this happened all throughout healthcare.

With programming, we know that complexity is something that must be actively fought or it sneaks in. We even have tons of special descriptions for how that happens: spaghetti code, big ball of mud, etc. So ask yourself: why would it be different in any other human-created system?

For me, this is part of the explanation for all the obscurity we see everywhere (that, and a vested interest of a number of parties in keeping things obfuscated). And my prediction is that the natural tendency of automation is to backfire, unless we actively fight this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSoWtXvqsgg

It's funny you should mention this. My last job was at an OTA (online travel agent). They started out with a website to book holidays and an intent to streamline the crap out of the process catering to individuals like yourself. They hired a skeleton call center staff to deal with unforeseen problems with an intent to rely upon them as little as possible.

Over time they realized that a lot of people were calling up to do bits and pieces of the booking over the phone that they could have done online.

Initially they tried to steer them back to the website but they realized that they were mostly dropping out of the sales funnel.

It turned out a lot of people actually wanted to talk to a human when spending $1,500 on a holiday. Shocker.

So, they changed tack and ramped up call center staffing, advertised a free phone number on the every page and let people essentially decide themselves where in the sales funnel they wanted to talk to a human - the whole way through or, like you, not at all.

This company had a really smart approach in other areas too about when to use automation and when not to.

>For the moment I pay humans to do some things like cleaning

You say that as if there has been a multitude of advances in home cleaning technology since the 1950s. I'm skeptical of the notion that Roombas took anybody's job or that I'm about to get a toilet cleaning robot any time soon.