What will we do when there is nothing to do? Automation!

Automation.

What has the real effect been and will we always keep inventing new jobs as automation continues to encroach on current occupations.

If you look back at the history of automation it is often argued that more jobs are created as a result of the introduction of new technologies, that the expansion of industries compensates for the increase in efficiency and sucks in more people in higher skilled positions to maintain the expansion.

I would tend to ask what really happened as the story has been different in different countries depending on the prevailing political environment in each country.

But before that, if you take a production process and you introduce automation what actually happens?

Well the experts in making the machines that provide the automation are having a good day, they are busier building their machines and they are better off because they are selling more machines.

At the factory a whole load of people that used to be part of the production process are probably now no longer required, the old 'one person can now to the job of several people' or in some cases the job of 'tens of people'.

The new machinery consumes more power and requires skilled mechanics to tend to it and keep it working sometimes they are in house staff or sometimes the support is provided exclusively by the manufacturer, sometimes both. Net result for the manufacturer is that the long term costs of the hardware and power are offset by the much larger savings in manpower and the increases in sales of whatever they make

What happens to those displaced by the machines, well if the employer has the need they will probably reallocate the best of them to an expanded production line and the rest will be laid off.

I've seen all this happen in real factories and of course it all sounds obvious but the specific result of all this is that a number of human beings are now at the mercy of market forces in terms of providing a future living for their family's.

Ok a step back, the UK took a clear decision to largely abandon manufacturing and to bet the farm on services at the start of the 1980's, the pain was immense but overall it eventually sort of worked but there was an economic hole left regards jobs for the least skilled people in the country, those who would have been production line fodder in times past.

There have always been people who are either only capable of low grade work or only desire to work at that level, in the past they might have worked on the land, later they worked in the first production line factories like the thread mills and cloth factories in dull repetitive intensively hard work jobs.

Now you look at the story of development in the modern world around the globe, big cities draw in farm workers to sit on assembly lines and to work on production lines, for very low wages, exactly what happened here a couple of hundred years ago.

As a result of that our least skilled are competing with cheaper low skilled labour across the planet, one of the main reasons that we have a persistent long term unemployment and benefits culture in the UK is a direct result of this global competition, the couple of hundred year monopoly on low grade work that we had in the west finally evaporated over the last 40 years.

The number of people claiming unemployment benefit has never been below .5 million in the last 40 years



you can clearly see the decision to abandon manufacturing in the graph and how long it took to absorb the result of that decision.

The new jobs largely didn't go to the people who were displaced, they went to their kids it was a generational effect. And where they did go to the displaced they were largely new jobs at significantly lower remuneration than the jobs that had been lost.

That 1992 - 2008 dip represents the rise of that service economy and the creation of all that middle management and office work that we now have. it took a long time and the story was very painful for a an awful lot of people.

Anyway this is just an opener I will post a wee bit more later regards where we are going next, at least where I think we are going next.

Families and 1980s, I know but I prefer my way sometimes

I got straight 'A' grades for everything except languages

If you were the synthesist that was responsible for overseeing the AI then you would want to learn law, but there won't be a lot of people in the profession of synthesist.

But when I get a chance I will continue my point, it was just too much to write all at one go.

My problem is that I don't think it will make any difference how hard they buckle down, we will be training people for positions that won't exist, in my view we are asking for a level of creativity from future kids that they just don't have because you can only imagine new things to do if you are innately creative.

The history of humanity is one of leaders and followers, new ideas appear new forms of work and just as quickly disappear, but you simply won't have 10 million unemployed UK people all individually inventing new ways of making a living, it won't happen the numbers are too large and the resources too low.

The history of the industrial revolution has seen individuals spotting opportunities that required them to employ large numbers of people as a resource, that generated employment and created the many vertical markets that exist today, what do you do in the next round, where are the new employment vertical markets going to come from to fill the gaps (human gaps) when all those existing industries become almost fully automated, what are the new markets that will appear that can't be automated?

Will everyone become a service provider?

Ada Lovelace the fist computer programmer, she has a programming language named after her, died 1852 she could see the limitless possibilities .

HG Wells got so much of the 20th century right.

There are many many examples from Science Fiction that got it right and so many that got it wrong.

The point is what is unique about what people can do that we can't do with AI.