A world without work

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work, Henry IV, Part 1

Now, three years after Google invented one, automated cars could be on their way to a highway near you. In the US, California and other states are rewriting the rules of the road to make way for driverless cars. Just one problem: What happens to the millions of people who make a living driving cars and trucks - jobs that always have seemed sheltered from the onslaught of technology?

"All those jobs are going to disappear in the next 25 years," predicts Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Driving by people will look quaint; it will look like a horse and buggy."

If automation can unseat bus drivers, urban deliverymen, long-haul truckers, even cabbies, is any job safe.

Vardi poses an equally scary question: "Are we prepared for an economy in which 50 percent of people aren't working?" Wiseman and Condon, "Will smart machines create world without work? Stuff, January 26, 2013

The LWW says retirement may not be for me since I get bored on long weekends. So when I read that we may be headed for an economy in which 50% of the population may not be working, I get a little nervous. 

I do take such predictions with a grain of salt. When I was a little boy growing up on the prairie back in the 60s, I remember articles in My Weekly Reader that predicted a future with personal jet packs, robot maids, burgers made of out honeybees, and 20 hour work weeks. At this point, none of these predictions have panned out. Those of us with jobs seem to be working longer hours, not shorter, even with technology doing many of the repetitive, mundane tasks. 

And the "knowledge worker" seems to have been fairly immune to the kinds of replacement by automation experienced by laborers and factory workers. But that is rapidly changing.

...the rise of computer technology poses a threat that previous generations of machines didn't: The old machines replaced human brawn but created jobs that required human brains. The new machines threaten both. - Wiseman and Condon

A few years ago in a column called Gone Missing, I shared a graph from 2004 that appeared in Educational Leadership1:

In the colum, I suggested that "Those being trained by automatons to be automatons will be among the first to go missing in tomorrow’s job market." - that the routine cognative work is that being taught and tested by those whose measure of academic success - of students, teachers, and schools - is based on standardized test scores.

Our mission, as both librarians and technologists, is to plan, teach, and advocate for alternate means of education - problem-solving, creativity, and authentic assessment. Unless students have the opportunity to practice "expert thinking" and "complex communications" they will never be among those who will remain employable. 

The ecomomic problems of a "world without work" I've always felt pale in comparison to the psychological problems that may beset those who cannot find a productive role in society. It is work that feeds our sense of self, gives us reason to get up in the morning, provides the challenges that make life interesting. It is the bored, the purposeless, the indolent for whom I feel the most sympathy - and who pose the biggest threat to the kind of safe and orderly world in which we would like to raise our own children and grandchildren.

At what point do our "smart goals" become not about test scores, but about something truly smart - educating students to do things that technology cannot?

1. Levy. Frank and Richard J. Murnane. “Education and the Changing Job Market” Educational Leadership, October 2004.

Comments

[Becca]

Some interesting ideas you have here.Love the positive tone of the article! Nicely done.
There is a saying "If you don't want to work don't eat".

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Becca,

Sounds like something my dad would have said. I worry that even those who want to work (and eat) may not have that option.

Appreciate the comment,

Doug