Log

In a 2/13/19 article on questions about Universal Basic Income (UBI), Kelsey Piper discusses issues surrounding Universal Basic Income and what it means after reading a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein .

The working paper raises questions about what problem UBI is meant to fix.

Are we looking for a UBI to increase labor market participation? Leave it the same? Decrease it? Do we want a UBI in order to fix welfare disincentives to work, or in order to fix the fact that people have to work to survive?

Kelsey Piper

But while the study and Piper are ostensibly well-intentioned, I’m not sure the right questions are being asked.

Most technologists are painfully aware of the likely effects of the coming wave of autonomous technology on human-as-machine labor. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, endless growth compensating for technological disemployment is not a realistic construct.

Human-as-Machine labor jobs will decrease. As these are the jobs that have been highly valued as the means of production for the last 250 years, the question facing our received notions of culture is really, “without these jobs, what will people do to live?” And how will we, as a society value what they do?

In a recent conversation, a colleague pointed out that with all this new tech, new jobs will be created. Of course that is true. But how many? When I was starting out in relational databases, it was “new tech” to most business development people. But I was simply doing what a roomful of clerks might have done ten or fifteen years before.

For one of the businesses I own, we used to employ four office workers beyond two executives. One assistant/secretary, two copyright clerks, and one “gopher” who made copies of audiotapes, bought microphones, and did deliveries. Beyond those workers, there was the phone vendor, the copy-machine service guy, the computer guy and a cleaner. Today, twenty years later, we have one employee, and that’s me. And I work from home. I can do all of those things faster and without getting up from my desk. Yes, the business is much more profitable, but none of those people is making money.

You might point out that people built the software and internet businesses I use, and they make money. Yes, but the workers who were replaced by those technologies would not have been able to become software developers. Fortunately, they were nearing retirement and were able to work for us until they no longer wished to.

So what will all these people do? The answer is that non-information economy workers will have to find a new purpose for their lives. And they will need money to spend to support economic growth.

In a recent conversation with David Chou on the excellent podcast IT Visionaries, Ian distilled a key takeaway.

The CIO needs to understand what metric the CEO is using.

The IT budget at most organizations is a considerable portion of operating costs, Chou explained, and most CEOs are interested in reducing costs: “If they can shave 2%, 5% off IT costs, that’s a lot of money.”

But Chou explained that at Kansas City Children’s hospital, just by building a customer facing scheduling tool for appointments, they were able to increase the number of patients seen by 17%.

Since hospitals earn money based on how many patients they see, this was a massive improvement to the hospital’s bottom line. Chou was quick to point out to the CEO that if he could have 1/2 of that new revenue, he could do even more.

Good executives everywhere know their business. But what they know is backward facing. They know what was done. What worked in the past. Because they have never seen the kind of digital transformation occurring in what Gartner calls the “4th Industrial Revolution,” they have no frame of reference for understanding how automated technology could revolutionize what they do and how they do it.

Chou says the “I” in CIO should also stand for “Influence.” It is imperative for CIOs to think bigger, and understand that the CEO has one core metric–the bottom line.

When CIOs are busy “keeping the lights on,” it’s hard to convey just how transformative IT can be. But we are at a point where this 4th Industrial Revolution is in the process of changing things on the order of the introduction of the telephone at the end of the 19th century.

From the white paper Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 by Kasey Panetta:

The Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology trends highlight changing or not yet widely recognized trends that will impact and transform industries through 2023.

Whether it’s cars, robots or agriculture, autonomous things use AI to perform tasks traditionally done by humans. The sophistication of the intelligence varies, but all autonomous things use AI to interact more naturally with their environments.

Autonomous things exist across five types:

• Robotics
• Vehicles
• Drones
• Appliances
• Agents

Those five types occupy four environments: Sea, land, air and digital. They all operate with varying degrees of capability, coordination and intelligence. For example, they can span a drone operated in the air with human-assistance to a farming robot operating completely autonomously in a field. This paints a broad picture of potential applications, and virtually every application, service and IoT object will incorporate some form of AI to automate or augment processes or human actions. Collaborative autonomous things such as drone swarms will increasingly drive the future of AI systems

Explore the possibilities of AI-driven autonomous capabilities in any physical object in your organization or customer environment, but keep in mind these devices are best used for narrowly defined purposes. They do not have the same capability as a human brain for decision making, intelligence or general-purpose learning.

I was struck by how a piece by the late Oliver Sacks in the February 11 New Yorker, “The Machine Stops” engages alienation anxiety via E.M. Forster’s story of the same title.

Sacks is writing at the end of his life of how “Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in th[e] virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate, in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.”

While Sacks was, in his own estimation, a grumpy old man, out of touch with technology, I’m sorry he didn’t see the promise of these “devices.” But neither did he suspect that we are on the cusp of a revolution far more disruptive to Western culture than the industrial revolution that gave birth to the technology he wistfully longs for in his piece–steam engines.

Much as the generation before his viewed the telephone as an unforgivable intrusion into home and family life, they ultimately realized it was a necessity. Not just for them to speak with distant family members, but also to conduct business without having to leave their families to go the office.

The earliest marketing for mobile technology touted its ability to allow us to spend time with our children when otherwise we would be stuck at the office. “Mommy, I want to go to the beach!” a child told her paper-shuffling, executive mother. With her trusty 8 lb. laptop, however, she was able to work on the beach (at least for forty five minutes before her battery died).

People might have seen me hunched over my smart phone as my son and I stood in the garden at Chenonceau–a chateau in the Loire Valley–and shaken their heads. Here’s a typical American, unable to “be” here and appreciate it with his son.

The only thing I can say is that ten years ago I would never have been able to be there with my son at all. I would have been sitting in an office in New York making phone calls and reading emails, taking care of business. While it may be unpleasant to consider how prevalent these infernal devices are, it might be better to consider how unpleasant it would be without them.

But more central to my concern with Sacks and Forster’s dystopian visions is that what they observed and were critiquing, and what made me have to take time to send emails and spreadsheets while in the garden at Chenonceau, was the use of connective technology under the rubric of alienated Capitalist valuation structures.

Why does Forster’s Kuno, separated from his mother by “The Machine,” not live with or see his mother? It’s because Capital, or Capital’s evil twin, Totalitarianism, deemed that mother and son are more productive separated.

People living through the height of the industrial revolution and human-as-machine labor saw how dehumanizing it was. They saw technology as the disruptor, but the disruptor was Capital. When people are worth less than the goods they manufacture, when they have little to no physical or emotional connection to the work they do, they become alienated.

We are in a transitional phase. I nervously check my phone all the time because I am anxious that at any moment something might happen at work that will derail my business and livelihood–and I am comparatively well off. I am also eager to stay ahead of my competition. These are not healthy attitudes that can go on forever.

We must use the next phase of technology to unplug. I would not have to “stay on top” of so many things if I had an AI assistant capable of performing the more mechanical tasks that take a lot of my time. But more importantly, if I knew that I and my family were secure via a social safety net and we had a culture that respected human beings for what they knew and how they acted rather than how much money they had accumulated, I wouldn’t need to be anxious at all.

Okay, if you’re a small to mid-size company, you probably don’t have a Chief Information Officer, but you should.

While you may still conceive of your business as operating in the “real” world, almost everything your business does consists of information that is being managed.

IT is seen by most business leaders as a tool, like a hammer, to use to do other things. But now that everything exists in the dataspace, from corporate communications to your company’s customers and vendors to your inventory and manufacturing, business leaders need to understand that IT is not a tool, it is how you do business.

A question I like to ask clients is “how much would it be worth to get a list of your biggest competitor’s customers, what they bought, and when?” Aside from the moral issues, the answer is never surprising.

Somewhere between “priceless,” and “a lot.”

And yet the same executives don’t give real thought to the security of their own information. Everything connected to the internet, from your vendor’s API to a web form for your customers is a potential target. For this reason alone, your company needs someone in the CIO role constantly on the lookout for security and data management developments.

A CIO can help you digitally transform your company by continually assessing your data needs for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Business Intelligence (BI), and Customer Relations Management (CRM). CIOs can revolutionize not just back office processes but also customer facing engagement and development initiatives.

At your next staff meeting, make it a priority to discuss who your digital transformation officer will be. At ATC, we recommend you find an in-house leader who’s interested in what IT can do, and give that person the tools to build a robust datascape for your business.

Of course, it would be best for you to hire a full-time, creative, CIO, but you’ll have to get in line. There are an estimated 200,000 CIO positions unfilled in the US alone.

Your business runs on data. Who sold what to whom? When did they sell it? How did they sell it? Who do we buy this from, and how much does it cost? How can we reduce transportation and logistics costs?

These are pretty simple “who” “what” “when” “why” “how” questions. And the answers might seem pretty straightforward.

But one of the biggest issues facing management is the quality of data–the answers to these questions you get from your managers and assistants is only as good as the data you collect and whether that data is correctly interpreted.

At ATC, we recognize that all data is not created equal. What’s important to your business may not be important to another business. One size fits all data management solutions won’t work if the person implementing them is not core to your business operations.

Possibly even more important, you need someone in a CIO role at your company who understands that data isn’t just answers: it poses questions. Your CIO needs to be smart and creative to look for questions your data is asking and knowing what data to collect moving forward.

When people talk about how little they want to pay for IT, the old carpenter’s adage comes to mind. “You can’t afford a cheap tool.”

Don’t shortchange your business being penny-wise and pound foolish. Rather than hiring another manager to analyze spreadsheets, hire one who will drive your digital transformation.

…for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the American economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.

Eduardo Porter –
Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two , NYT 2/8/19

In my previous post I expressed my discomfort at many of the constructions in this article. The quote above entails the most concerning aspect.

Here’s the problem: Society as a whole has determined that work best done by humans is not valuable. Caring for the sick, taking orders and delivering nourishment, creating a welcoming atmosphere to world-weary travelers, and helping people buy and maintain their homes and businesses is not worth a lot of money.

When Capital needed human-as-machine labor, it created manufacturing and clerical jobs to execute all those tasks. Those jobs had the most value, because without them, nothing could happen. Everything else was “just” service.

In the big, bad “shiny new high-tech” world, however, automation is taking those human-as-machine jobs away from humans and giving it to machines.

Humans should fight back!

But no. Everyone in the AI, machine learning and robotics world knows that the jobs they are “taking away” from humans are jobs that should never have been done by humans in the first place.

The human toll of human-as-machine labor is terrible. That’s what the Luddites were opposed to–not just their loss of work, but also their loss of humanity.

We are social animals. Everyone is lamenting the loss of connectedness, yet many people want to increase human-as-machine productivity, rather than off-load it onto automated processes that would execute it easily, quickly, and with no alienation, eye or back strain.

The lowly “service” job is a by-product of harmful human-as-machine Capitalism. If you have ever watched a nurse lovingly support a sick relative, you know the rage you feel realizing that this person is overworked and underpaid. Nurses, teachers, servers are humans who care for us, educate us and feed us. What more important work could there possibly be?

In today’s New York Times piece by Eduardo Porter, Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two (https://tinyurl.com/y72qmxlj) the threat of automation is foregrounded.

The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.

But the cost of automation to workers and society could be substantial. “It may well be that,” Mr. Summers said, “some categories of labor will not be able to earn a subsistence income.” And this could exacerbate social ills, from workers dropping out of jobs and getting hooked on painkillers, to mass incarceration and families falling apart.

Silicon Valley’s dream of an economy without workers may be implausible. But an economy where most people toil exclusively in the lowliest of jobs might be little better.

— Eduardo Porter

I’m sorry, but Silicon Valley dreams of an economy without workers? That is absolutely not the case. Many in Silicon Valley, particularly in the AI and robotics fields are deeply conscious of how their work is impacting the labor market.

Many understand that the middle-class job-for-life is not coming back, and so support measures like a universal or minimum basic income precisely to offset the massive gains in productivity and concomitant losses for human laborers that automation generates for society.

Automation is here, just like the combustion engine is here, just like global warming is here. The question is not how do we go back to heartless 19th century human-as-machine manufacturing, but how we go forward.

Will automation decimate the world’s workforce?

There’s a lot of scary talk bouncing around, from tech blogs to published books like “Rise of the Machines” to presidential contender Andrew Yang.

Many commentators in the tech sphere hoping to downplay the coming disruption to the workforce point to some statistics that seem to indicate job losses won’t be anything near the 80% figure touted by some.

One of the most popular examples given is that of the bank tellers. When ATMs were introduced in the 1980s, it was predicted that tellers were doomed. Why would we need a bunch of tellers when you could get your money from a machine?

What happened, however, was that the number of tellers in each bank went from 22 to 13, which reduced branch operation costs so much that banks were able to focus on expansion and consumer relations. There ended up being more tellers in 2000 than there had been in 1980.

Well, that’s just great news for everyone, right? Automation allows for growth that will offset employment reductions!

But it’s not quite that simple. If you take into account that many industries have already used analog/digital efficiencies to reach market saturation, and that the overall population of the US increased by 100 million people (or just under 50%) over the same period, what’s going to happen as the population shrinks and the economy contracts?

Business leaders have an “endless growth” bias. They need to remain optimistic and keep the masses from rising up in a Luddite frenzy.

The reality is that a lot of jobs will be “innovaporized” by the coming automation wave. Yes, cobots and RPAs will play well with humans, but if you don’t need twenty people on a machine floor, why would you keep them there?

There’s a great summary of current trends/activities in RPA leaders in Michael Baxter’s IA article here: https://tinyurl.com/yd3zjwko

The question of why RPA is such a boon to businesses running legacy, disconnected systems is not directly addressed, as the article is focusing on new, data intensive businesses that are looking to build new CRM > Operations scalable solutions.

While that will be the bread and butter of RPA advancement and deployment, for RPA to truly get onto “every desktop,” businesses with no digital agenda will have to buy in, which they should.