Ever since the dawn of the Age of Machines people have been worried that smart machines would displace humans from a lot of jobs. We’ve been reassured that this has never come to pass, i.e., that automation has created more jobs than it has destroyed. In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark points out that “there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. … the arrival of the internal combustion engine … rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.”
Unskilled labor has done remarkably well since the Industrial Revolution, partly because the fastest growing economies experienced sharply curtailed birthrates and limited immigration. If an economy were to slow or population growth were to accelerate or higher minimum wage laws were to be put into effect, Clark suggests that millions of the least skilled workers might find themselves out of a job.
Computers do the work of millions of people. But instead of replacing the people with computers we expand the amount of work. A large company could not file all of its annual reports without computers, even if they hired all the clerks in the world.
35 years ago, many companies did not have a computer, few had more than one, and a typical office worker worked 40 hours a week. Now a typical office worker works 40 hours a week. (Or I should say that’s the standard; I know plenty who are paid for 40 but work 50 or more.)
I was considering the other day that the cashiers at retail establishments are really nothing more than an HCI for the POS system. They are not empowered to provide any more than the most rudimentary assistance, generally less informative than a glossy brochure, and will only provide a low level of customer service, and only when the right incantations are spoken, and then only up to the level of their authorization. Anything more requires a call from the customer to their customer support office, which also results in a frustrating level of non-service. Personally, I would prefer an automated retail system. At least that way you know there really is nothing more that it could do, instead of arguing with someone pretending to be human, but is solely there to repeat a scripted argument.