How will society keep human labor relevant in an era of increasing automation?
How will society keep human labor relevant in an era of increasing automation?
Society has been dealing with this since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution
Machines and technology have been helping us gradually increase our productivity for over two centuries, enabling humans to work less and enjoy life more. That’s how society has kept human labor relevant and I fully expect this trend to only continue in the coming years.
In mid-19th century England, the typical person started working in their teens. Most jobs were blue-collar jobs that involved manual labor under what would today be considered very unsafe conditions. At these jobs, the typical worker averaged more than 3,000 hours (e.g. 6 days per week, 10 hours per day) per year. Life expectancy was around 50 years and the working class generally worked until they died, in aggregate spending around half of their waking lives toiling away.
Today, life expectancy has increased by more than thirty years while at the same time, average hours worked has decreased to less than 2,000 per year. Most jobs in the U.K. today are service sector jobs that rely more on brains than brawn and even blue-collar jobs are far less strenuous than before. Instead of starting to work in their teens, people are staying in school longer; today it is quite typical for a person to start working “for real” in his or her mid-20s. In aggregate, the average British person spends less than one-fifth of their waking lives on the clock.
With the continued proliferation of technology and automation, my expectation is that these trends will only continue in the coming decades.
In wealthy countries, automation and technology will allow the average person to maintain the same (or better) standard of living while spending a smaller and smaller percentage of their lifetime clocking in. In developing countries, automation and technology will allow their citizens to eventually adopt high-quality standards of living that developed countries enjoy. Technology will also allow people everywhere to work much more flexibly and efficiently: no longer will we be tied to a desk or the factory floor; on-demand jobs (enabled by technology) will allow more and more of us to work at our own pace.
Technology will also make life outside of work much more enjoyable or at the very least, much more efficient. In the early 1990s, I remember eagerly waiting at my mailbox for the postman to come deliver letters from my summer camp friends, often with each round of communication taking a week or more. Sure, the anticipation of waiting for the next letter brings back fond memories, but it was nothing like a mere two decades later where we can communicate instantly on our phones with friends from around the world. As life outside of work becomes more interesting, there will be greater incentive for people to work less and enjoy life more.
Certainly there will always be the ambitious ones who are genetically or otherwise pre-disposed to work harder than the rest of society. These are the people today who work 80+ hours per week while everybody else works a pedestrian forty. But let’s also put these folks in perspective: an 80-hour work week was quite normal two centuries ago and not only that, work back then was a whole lot more physically taxing.
So a few short decades from now, as the average work week shrinks to something like 25-30 hours per week, we will marvel at how certain people are logging 40 or even 50 (!) hours per week while everybody else is enjoying their bountiful technology-enabled leisure time. Kind of like these guys ...
... except hopefully with better exercise regimens, fewer sugary drinks and not in any sort of apocalyptic scenario where we have to leave Earth for a few decades while our robot friends clean up the planet.
This was originally published in Quora in March 2016.