Ask an engineer how AI will impact the economy, you’ll get a scary answer. The robots are going to take all our jobs. Technology will develop too fast for human skills to catch up. In a couple of decades, unemployment will be at least 20%.
Ask an economist, and you’ll get a more measured response. Technology has replaced jobs before, they say. But the economy always creates even more new jobs to fill the void. If technology has any ill effect, it’s in the form of what economists call skills-biased technical change: where most wealth accrues to the people whose skills are complemented by technology, leaving behind everyone for whose skills technology is a substitute.
Look closely at both of those answers, they both have the same big implication for society: to live a comfortable life in the future, you’ll have to perform non-routine work that machines can’t do. Social equality will depend on all humans using the creative, social, strategic, or keenly perceptive and manipulative parts of their brains to do something of economic value. On this, even deep learning engineers with Singularity countdown clocks can agree with white-haired economists who don’t use email.
Civilization has never conditioned most humans to view work as a creative or strategic endeavor. Ever since the best strategy for survival became to grow crops, people have done more or less the same thing over and over again every day. If they were lucky enough to avoid misfortune at the hands of Mother Nature or the God of War, they could derive happiness from family, children, and the possibility of an afterlife. Industrialization only reinforced the repetitive nature of work for most people. Transitioning to an economy where every single worker does non-routine work, using the most human parts of their brains, would be unprecedented.
As an optimist (or maybe a sucker), I figured I would try to see if this transition wasn’t already happening. So I assembled a dataset that would let me view the share of the workforce comprised of occupations whose required tasks, skills, knowledge, or abilities are highly creative, social, or keenly perceptive/manipulative for each year going back to 1999. The Bureau of Labor Statistics website isn’t awesome, and I wish standard formats for federal data releases were a thing, but after 12 hours of repeated INDEX/MATCHes, I finally had the numbers I was looking for.
(I did this by building on the infamous 2013 study by Oxford scholars Osborne and (not Walder) Frey that concluded 47% of US jobs were at high risk of automation in the next 20 years. I won’t bore you with the details of my methodology unless you are curious, in which case, yes, I would love for you to read about how I spent my weekend).
And, sadly, the needed transition to a non-routine economy is not underway. The share of jobs scored highly for the level of creativity, social intelligence, or powers of perception/manipulation has held steady at around 24% since 1999. And because I’m obsessed with the concept of creativity as a panacea for all of society’s political, spiritual, and economic problems, I looked at a subset made up of the 90 jobs that scored highly for originality and fine arts knowledge. Alas, these jobs have held steady at 6.2% of the workforce since 1999.
Based on these trends, the outlook for social equality in the US is not awesome. What kind of changes do we need for the transition to a human-centric economy to take place?
First, the trends I looked for in the data and failed to find could materialize: the non-routine jobs I was looking at could start to become a larger part of the economy. Let’s say that advances in natural language processing put all paralegals out of work. That would free up capital for more massage therapists and yoga instructors. Enough new massage therapists and yoga instructors might enter the market, leading to lower wages, and suddenly everyone in the economy can afford their services. So we maintain full employment, and a population that is more flexible, mindful, and well-massaged than ever before.
I don’t think that specific scenario is likely. But stuff like that could happen at the margins. Also, I wish to God the BLS had had occupation-level employment data from before 1999; it would be great to see if a such a shift away from routine work – perhaps resulting from some past wave of automation – has ever taken place before.
Anyway, the yoga/massage utopia scenario doesn’t even consider the possible creation of entirely new categories of work – the economist’s trump card. It’s a historically and logically sound argument to say that automation technology can unleash massive latent demand for new services.
Or there is another scenario: occupations could become more creative, social, or perceptive/manipulative, as people performing them use the extra time they gain from automating routine tasks to find new creative, social, or perceptive/manipulative ways of increasing their output.
This could already be happening. Businesses and other organizations have been using software to automate routine tasks and cut costs for decades. Unless employees of those businesses have been using time saved from automation for office naps, they will have already been augmenting the creative, strategic, or social aspects of their job performance. Anecdotally speaking, this has been happening in the legal industry, where firms' hourly rates have skyrocketed over the last twenty years, as the number of lawyers required to work on projects has decreased due to legal software diffusion.
And if this trend were happening across the economy, my analysis wouldn’t have measured it. Though I looked at employment levels for each occupation going back to 1999, the scores I used to measure the creative, social, or perceptive/manipulative skills required for job performance were based on federal surveys from 2013. The BLS could have updated these job characteristic scores to reclassify previously routine occupations as more human.
Such a trend WOULD show up in a rising productivity rate, which measures output per hour of work. Alas, productivity has been flat since 2004 – one of the most troubling mysteries in the economy today.
Many people I’ve talked to presume that the economy can sustain only so many creative, social, or perceptive/manipulative occupations, and that the bulk of the population must necessarily be made up of people doing routine work, or no work at all. I disagree. I think this is a transition that can take place — it’s just a big shift in how people think.
Scientifically speaking, every human being has a strategic brain, the ability to socialize, and the ability originate ideas. As routine tasks are automated this century, social stability will depend on us making each person’s latent ingenuity economically valuable. Too bad this isn’t already happening that I can see.