Much of the narrative around the future of work frames things in terms of the jobs that are set to be lost as the march of technology sweeps through society ever faster. It’s a march that many believe is not only getting faster, but will sweep through ever more professions as technology gets more capable.
Alongside this, there is widespread concern about the rise of the gig economy and the inherently unstable jobs that have emerged within it. Not only are these jobs fundamentally insecure, but they also lack many of the social safety nets that have built up over the years around more traditional forms of employment.
It’s into this context that Cornell University’s Louis Hyman has written his latest book, Temp. For the most part, the book provides a fascinating journey through changing nature of work, with the tale beginning with the creation of Manpower in 1948, which heralded tremendous growth in temporary forms of employment.
Alongside this, the growth in management consultants, many of whom would encourage the use of contingent workers to allow companies to have flexible staffing to meet the demands of the market, has given our current labor market a very long lead time.
Into the future
Perhaps the most interesting part of Hyman’s journey comes towards the end however, when he considers how this may unfold as technology does become more powerful. He cites an example of a demonstration he received of a towel folding robot, which when left to its own devices was pretty mediocre at folding towels, but it came with a virtual reality add-on that allowed a human to operate the robot remotely. When man and machine worked in this way, the results were indeed impressive.
It’s perhaps not the ‘augmented intelligence’ that many in the tech industry tout, but Hyman believes that it’s perhaps a more likely destination for a global society whereby a tremendous rise in gig-based employment is married with growing concerns about migrants in many western countries.
He reasons that having people in lower cost regions of the world operating machines, like his towel folding robot, is a seemingly inevitable next step for an economy that is already putting the foundation for such work in place.
“All those physical jobs that ‘can’t be moved overseas’ will be moved overseas,” he explains. “As those overseas workers drive the robots, the machines will learn. Instead of one hundred towel folds, robotic operators will fold towels millions of times.”
Tesla provide an interesting example of such an approach in action. Whereas Google required their own drivers and vehicles to rack up the miles with their autonomous vehicles, Tesla simply fitted all of their vehicles with sensors and got regular customers collecting data as they drove around.
This, Hyman suggests, has allowed Tesla’s autopilot capabilities to scale up much faster than other companies in the sector. By combining man and machine in this way, it allows the technology to learn at a rate that is much harder now, before the machines gradually replace even those who are training them.
“This feedback loop of VR/machine learning/cheap labor will rapidly bring self-working robots into our lives in a way that without those millions of hours of training could never happen,” Hyman explains. “Robots will get trained for free, like a Tesla, and our debates over migrant labor will be moot as Americans and Europeans opt for domestic robot bodies and foreign human minds.”
Who will be left behind?
For Hyman, the gradual march of temporary work has seen a constant erosion of the kind of social contracts that stable work provide, so how does he envisage the future unfolding given this uncertainty appears to be reaching it’s technology-induced zenith?
Interestingly, whereas many have bemoaned the rise of the gig economy, Hyman believes that platforms like UpWork and Etsy offer tremendous potential in helping those who have been left behind by the globalized economy we live in. The ability for these platforms to offer interesting and meaningful work regardless of location offers hope to people in areas of the world that are removed from the traditional economic hubs of their country.
Too often, we view this discussion through the lens of the jobs that have been lost, with the perspective often rose-tinted and romanticized in terms of the enjoyability afforded by jobs that were often routine, rote and labor intensive. Such machine jobs, Hyman argues, are best done by machines, leaving humans free to do work that is more befitting the things that make humans unique.
Suffice to say, he isn’t advocating that everyone become a programmer or graphic designer, or one of the kind of roles that are so commonly offered via these platforms, but rather that more of these platforms should emerge to allow a wider range of skills to be offered from wherever a person happens to be located.
“While the flexible workforce and the flexible firm brought insecurity in the last forty years, we can turn them around now and make them work for us,” Hyman writes. “Technology will make it possible, but what will make it happen is collective will to finally achieve the real American dream.”
Of course, providing a narrative to explain the past is always a more certain endeavor than proposing one to predict the future, and it’s far from certain that this more benign version of the future will unfold. Recent research highlighted the lack of real mutual support found in the gig economy, so the suggestion for greater ‘unionization’ of gig work seems unlikely, but as an exploration of how we arrived at the present time, the book is excellent.
