The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

As for the substance of this interesting submitted article, the historical facts are reviewed in a key paragraph before the article goes off into speculation about the future: "For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass." The nub of the article's argument is that new forms of technological change might not leave us with any new forms of gainful employment.

After its interesting text discussion and chart predicting what kinds of employment are least likely to be automated out of existence, the article points out one difference between the world of the past and the world of today: "Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This means that the 'reservation wage'—the wage below which a worker will not accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour." Indeed, it may be that the funding of governmental benefits will become secure enough through rising productivity that many current workers will have children who do not need a job at all.

All those are strong reasons TO automate firefighting. Machines can function better in heat/smoke/violent structural collapse situations. They can make objective analysis when their own mortality is not an issue.

Nobody made money betting against advances in computing.

While that might sound absurd, consider the following:

* Companies, particularly large ones, need to have staff on hand for when heavy work hits, but can't just fire them in their off season, not without destroying morale.

* Classic hiring practices are terrible at selecting for actual technical ability, and no one wants to trust the demonstrably valuable work to "the new person." Busy-work provides a way to test their proficiency without ruining the business in the process.

* Management prestige (and pay) is often tied to one's direct report head-count. Worse, stack rankings and similar systems tie career survival to extraneous, buffer head-count.

* Firing someone is surprisingly hard in most companies. A single lawsuit or a few days of outage from a legacy system maintained by only one curmudgeon can wipe out all the (on-paper) savings from firing an ineffective or even counter-productive person.

* Some managers genuinely care about their employees, and want to shield them from the existential and health threats of losing their job and insurance.