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Metropolis Now: The Two Worlds of Employment in the Age of Automation

Current events have revealed that there are two worlds in the employment landscape. One is digital, the other analog. For the most part, those in IT—the digital workers—have been unaffected by the spike in unemployment due to the economic side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it doesn’t mean they’ll be untouched in the long-term. As current events demonstrate, when it comes to the essentials in life, we’re all connected. Yet, the divide will continue to separate us to the detriment of all unless we do something about it.

When observing current events, I can’t help but think about Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent movie, Metropolis. It’s a science fiction film that depicts a world in which a small number of people live a privileged life in skyscrapers that tower high above the city. The rest of the population toils away below ground, doing the mundane work required to keep the city running. It’s a stunning piece of cinematography. The sets and special effects are breathtaking. What’s also impressive is that, for better or worse, so much of what Lang presented nearly 100 years ago has come to be.

You can view the full-length version of Metropolis here.

Figure 1: Scenes from the 1927 silent movie, Metropolis by Fritz Lang.

Lang’s vision of the future has a strange, almost eerie prescience for me, particularly as someone who has spent most of his adult life working in IT. It’s one that’s entirely possible, yet one I hope we avoid.

Allow me to elaborate.

Life Is A-OK in the Cloud

There’s a good argument to be made that today we live in Lang’s Metropolis, a world in which those who are doing really well live in the light of society while those who are just getting by live below ground in darkness.

The widening gap between prosperity and economic hardship is a trend that’s been unfolding over the last 30 years. We’ve become accustomed to it. Sadly, it’s no longer newsworthy.

What is newsworthy is the dramatic spike in unemployment due to the business shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The uptick in unemployment reveals a troubling set of circumstances: If you’re a digital worker chances are you’re still working. If you work in the analog world, that place where factories, restaurants, airlines, movie theaters, hotels, cruise ships and warehouses exist, there’s a good chance you or someone you know is out of a job, for now anyway.

Take a look at the graph from the US Private Sector Job Quality Index, a project from Cornell University Law School and others, by way of vox.com. It lists the jobs that are most vulnerable to layoffs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. IT workers don’t even make the list. It’s as if we live in another world.

Figure 2: Information workers are absent from the list of jobs at risk due to COVID-19.

The long and the short of it is that for developers, sysadmins, SREs and all the other people working in information technology, the recent economic downturn is but a blip in the daily news feed. For those manning a cash register, taking a ticket at the local cineplex, cutting hair or driving for a rideshare service, it’s a life-altering event. Or, to put it terms of Lang’s film, those of us who live in the clouds are doing well, and for those on the ground, it’s a different story.

Now, consider this: What if all the people who are presently laid off from their jobs find out there are no jobs to go back to? What if the economic recovery is slower than anticipated or society gets so accustomed to doing without that consumption doesn’t resume? Is such a scenario possible? Yes. Is it probable? Dunno. Will those of us in IT who work remotely all over the planet, from the comfort of our wired office, suffer? I doubt it. But, as for the rest, what then?

Let’s go back to the movie.

A Workforce Divided

There’s a point in the film when the protagonist, Freder (the son of the industrialist who built Metropolis), goes to his father to inquire about a catastrophic underground explosion shown earlier in the film.

The son asked, “Your magnificent city, Father, and you, the brain of this city, and all of us in this city’s light … and where are the people, Father, whose hands built your city?”

The father responded, “Where they belong.”

The son asked, “Where they belong? In the depths?”

His father nodded his head yes. (See the scene here).

There you have it. With that one physical gesture, Lang foreshadows a future which might very well be at our doorstep. As I mentioned earlier, it’s eerie, it’s prescient and it looks as if it’s coming to be.

What Does This All Have to Do with DevOps?

Those of us in DevOps have made valuable contributions to the world. We’ve done dramatically more good than harm. We’ve also been well compensated. The average salary for a SRE in the USA is $131,340, with a low of $60K and a high of $192K. Yet, the top salary for grocery clerk at Ralph’s supermarket is $22 an hour, which comes out to $44K a year over a 50 week year.

Do SREs deserve such a high salary? Of course, they do. Does a grocery clerk deserve only $44K a year in comparison? At the end of 2019, it would have been easy to say, yes. It’s a low skill, low education job. But that was then, and this is now. As of this writing, toilet paper is a premium commodity and the shelves need to be stocked with it. I’ll wager that in some circles, paying someone $50 an hour to get the rolls on the shelf is reasonable compensation. It all depends on how much people want toilet paper.

Am I being a bit dramatic? A little, but still, it’s worth thinking about.

So, what’s the important take away? Let’s go back to Metropolis one last time.

At the beginning of the film, there’s a scene in which the protagonist, Freder, was frolicking about in a lush arboretum-like greenhouse atop a skyscraper. He was surrounded by pretty maidens dancing. An elevator door opened into the garden. Freder observed as a group of raggedy waifs from beneath the city exited out of the elevator. A woman leading the waifs was at the head of the group. The waifs looked around in amazement at such luxury. Then, Freder’s servants ushered the group back into the elevator to exit. Freder was obviously affected by the waifs. He went into the depths of the city to investigate.

Shortly thereafter, Freder went to see his father to inquire about the explosion I described earlier. His father asked, “What were you doing in the machine halls, Freder?”

The son responded, “I wanted to look into the faces of the people whose little children are my brother, my sisters…”

It’s a powerful scene. It makes me wonder how many of the faces I’ve seen of those who were working in February are now sitting home, unemployed and unable to pay the rent in April.

The takeaway is this: We’re all connected at a level much deeper than the trivial interactions of the given social network. Current events have demonstrated the fact in spades. COVID-19 was first reported in China around November 17, 2019. On April 4, 2020, less than six months later, there were 240 cases reported in the state of South Dakota in the United States. If that’s not connection, I don’t know what is.

Those of us who work in the cloud are doing quite well, despite the setbacks caused by the global pandemic. But, there’s a growing number of us who are not doing so well and won’t be for the foreseeable future. It’s easy when everything is peaches and cream to be unaware of a world in which six-figure salaries are not the norm. But, when things go south and there’s no toilet paper to be had, the realization that we’re all in this together smacks us square in the face, like it or not.

The question then becomes, given that we’re all connected, what type of world do we want to share, the one in Lang’s Metropolis or something better?

It’s something worth thinking about. The pandemic will pass, but the underlying disparities will remain unless we do something about them.

Don’t forget to check out my new, free book, “The Impact of Automation.”

This book takes a serious examination of the history, impact and results from automation on our society and culture. Hope you enjoy it.

April 21, 2020
Full-Time Employment in the Age of Automation

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a short essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which he predicted that in a hundred years the 15-hour work week will be commonplace. Keynes made this assertion based on two factors: first, the increase in capital due to extraordinary yields from the compound interest that was made possible by increased foreign (global) investment; second, the growth of technological achievement made necessary by the competitive forces of capitalism and made possible by the availability of excess capital.

Keynes pointed out that these events are recent in terms of the entirety of human history, taking place over the last 500 years. Before that time, things were stagnant. Gold reserves remained static until the opening of the New World and technology, save for a few episodic breakthroughs, was pretty much unchanged. For example, the way cloth was made during the time of Joan of Arc, around 1400 AD, was not that different than the way it was made when the Roman emperor Hadrian had a wall built across northern England in 100 AD.

But, the growing availability of money and technology changed everything. By 1920, the more affluent in the population wore factory-manufactured clothing bought in a store. Those of lesser means might still be making clothes at home, but the cloth from which the garment was made came from a factory.

Mass-market capitalism powered by technological innovation increased human productivity on a scale unique in the human experience. Abundance on a global scale seemed a real possibility within a few generations. According to Keynes,

“If capital increases, say, 2 percent per annum, the capital equipment of the world will have increased by a half in 20 years, and seven and a half times in a hundred years. Think of this in terms of material things—houses, transport, and the like.”

Yet, today most people work 40 hours a week, if not more. Considering that Keynes was essentially a quant who lived and breathed data, how could he get it so wrong?

My thinking is not so much that Keynes got it wrong, but that we’re having a hard time accepting that he might have gotten it right.

Allow me to elaborate.

The Facade of Productivity

I have a theory: For the average contributor-employee in a medium- to large-size corporation (with 500 employees and more), of all the tasks he or she performs during a 40-hour week, only about half—20 hours’ worth—actually add value to the enterprise. The rest is organizational overhead. Thus, there is a good argument to be made that when you do the math, what we can call real full-time employment is closer to Keynes’s prediction of the 15-hour work week than not. The remaining time, which I call “organizational overhead,” is really just a facade of productivity.

This theory occurred to me a while back, when I was sitting in a sprint planning meeting observing a project manager and tech-leads do task assignments. The first thing the project manager did was to determine how much time each member of the project team had available to work on the project’s tasks. The agreed-upon number was 20 hours a week.

The 20-hours a week number struck me as strange. All members of the project team were completely dedicated to the project. They had no side work. The project was their one and only focus. What were they doing with the other 20 hours?

I asked the project manager and he answered, “Well, they have to do things like answer emails, go to meetings and sometimes there’s some firefighting to be done.”

Oh.

The Amazing Ability to Absorb the Cost of Organizational Overhead

I wish I could say that the project manager’s response was unique. But, in my experience, it’s not. I’ve been in more than one company in which meetings, email and firefighting occupy at least half of a full-time employee’s work week. And, I’ve got to tell you that, except in the rarest instance of mission-critical firefighting, most of these situations have marginal productive value.

Granted, my theory is based on experiences that are anecdotal. The actual numbers might prove me wrong. Obviously, a thorough, quantitative study is needed. Still, whether it’s five, 10, 20 or even 35 hours a week, what’s amazing is not that employees spend a lot of time in activities that have questionable productive value, but rather, that businesses can actually operate profitably despite these ongoing time-sinks. Why? Because of automation. Machines and software are allowing people to do more work in less time—and it’s not only confined to IT.

The Dirty Little Secret of Working on an Assembly Line

Doubling up has always been the dirty little secret of automotive factory work. Ben Hamper revealed the details of technique in his 1986 book, “Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line.” Here’s how it works: Imagine that you and I work in a GM plant and do jobs at the same location on an assembly line—say, putting headlights and taillights in a car. Your job is to put in the headlights; my job is to put in the taillights. One day I notice that I can probably put the headlights and taillights in a car in the same amount of time it takes two of us to do the tasks separately. So, I propose a deal to you: I’ll do your job and my job for four hours a day in exchange for you doing the same for me. This way we can both work half time for full-time pay. We might have to pay the line foreman a small bribe to look the other way, but what the heck? The benefits are obvious, so we do it. Win-win, as the saying goes.

How can we pull this off? Simple: as stated earlier, automation.

Without the technology of the assembly line, we just couldn’t double up. The car needs to be brought to us for us to increase productivity to the point where one person can do the work of two. The automation of the assembly line effectively reduced our work week while maintaining our productivity, just as Keynes predicted.

As you can see, the 15-hour work week is quite possible—and, in many cases, quite real. It’s just that the facade of productivity, which exists in larger companies, hides its existence. But, what about the smaller companies such as construction companies, law firms, small manufacturers, dental offices and software startups that employ fewer than 100 people? These types of companies cannot afford a lot of non-productive activity. How do these companies get to the 15-hour work week? Is it possible?

My answer is yes, but the world that will need to exist to make the 15-hour work week possible will look dramatically different than the one we have today. What will that world look like? Allow me to illustrate using my neighborhood cafe, the C&M, as an example.

The Real Implications of the 15-Hour Work Week

My favorite neighborhood cafe is the C&M. It’s a hangout sort of place with good food, good coffee and Wi-Fi. The C&M is usually staffed by two employees during its business hours—7 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week. Between them, they take orders as well as make the food and deliver it to the tables.

Let’s do the math. Let’s figure that the actual working day at the C&M is 12 hours—10 hours of operation time and two hours of setup and cleanup. That comes out to 84 hours a week. Thus, excluding the owners’ time, the number of employee hours needed to run the C&M is 168. (two employees at 84 hours a week.) This comes out to around four people required to staff the business using the current 40-hour work week model, again excluding the owner’s time.

Now, let’s say the business is quite profitable and the owner can afford to pay employees $20 an hour, plus health insurance. Adding in payroll tax and workman’s compensation (more than $5 an hour) plus the cost of health insurance ($400 a month, for illustration purposes), the weekly cost of each employee working 40 hours is $1,100, which translates into a total weekly labor cost for the C&M of $4,400.

So far, so good.

This time, let’s interpret the C&M labor situation in terms of the 15-hour work week. To cover the 168 hours per week that the C&M is operational, at a 15-hour work week per employee, the C&M needs to employee 11 people—actually, it’s 11.2 employees, but I rounded down. So, under Keynes prediction, if each employee is entitled to the established full-time compensation of $1,100 as calculated earlier, the weekly payroll for the C&M goes from $4,400 a week to $12,100—an almost three times increase, which is not an affordable number. Even though the number of employees has gone up, the odds are that the actual sales will remain the same. Instead of having to employ four people producing $14,000 a week in sales—$2,000 a day over seven days, again for illustration purposes—now the owner of the C&M will be employing 11 people to produce the same amount. Bankruptcy is imminent.

Clearly, the C&M cannot tolerate 11 people working 15 hours a week for a full-time wage under current conditions. So much for the 15-hour work week. Well, not so fast. Let’s reimagine the scenario from a different angle: Suppose that the number of employees stays at four, but instead of working 40 hours a week, each employee works 15. What could we add to the mix to make this scenario possible? Give up? OK, I’ll tell you: robots.

Imagine that instead of having two people on hand to set up the cafe, take orders, make the food, bring it over to tables, bus the table and then clean up at the end of the day, we had one person on hand to do what we’ll call human essential work. All the other work gets done by robots. Then, the typical interaction looks like this: Customers enter orders directly into an iPad, the robotic coffee maker gets the order and makes the double espresso, a robot in the kitchen makes the food, with the intermittent help of a human when necessary, and a robot delivers the food to the table. The one human on hand interacts with customers and picks up the slack work the robot can’t do. You can think of the scenario as the restaurant equivalent of a driverless Uber ride.

Is such a world possible? Yes. In fact, it’s happening as you read this article. There’s already a chain of waiterless sushi restaurants in Japan. As the technology drops in price, more restaurants will make the transition.

The 15-hour work week could indeed become a real possibility provided that two conditions exist: affordable robotic technology with a high degree of manual dexterity is available, and the employer is willing to pay the higher wages necessary to support the model.

In the past, workers such as Ben Hamper used their ingenuity to take advantage of the reduction in labor that automation made possible. Sadly, such efforts were clandestine and deceitful. All that GM needed to do to realize a better return on labor was to speed up the assembly line. Yet, when you think about it, back then GM wasn’t doing that badly when Hamper was doubling up. 1984 was a record-setting year in sales, despite his shenanigans. Speeding up the line would undoubtedly increase GM’s bottom line. But, would it double Hamper’s take home? Probably not. (Author’s Note: GM’s sales dropped 26 percent in 1986, but profits were still a healthy $1.06 billion.)

So here are two questions to contemplate: As companies, large and small, adopt robotics to increase productivity, will they indeed share the benefits of the increased productivity with the average worker so he or she can enjoy a 15-hour work week? And then, should the 15-hour work week indeed become standard, what will the average person do with all this newfound leisure? As the saying goes, idle hands make fretful minds. According to Keynes:

“Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.”

For those of you that think about such things, I will leave up to you to answer these questions. As for me, I can’t wait for the robots to take over so I can go back to my studies, full-time.

— Bob Reselman

March 5, 2019
The ‘Blockbuster Effect’ in the Age Of Automation
Saying that new jobs will always be created to replace those that have been eliminated by automation is a mechanism for avoiding a real problem that’s lurking on the horizon.

In 2004, at the height of its popularity, Blockbuster Video had more than 9,000 stores and employed more than 80,000 people worldwide. About 50,000 of the total workforce was employed in the United States. Going down to Blockbuster to pick up a movie was a Friday night ritual for many, this writer included.

Blockbuster and other video rental stores, along with the advent of affordable Big Screen TVs, were significant contributing factors in the growth of the home theater. People now had an alternative to $10 movie tickets and battling weekend traffic to get to the cineplex. An entire family could view a recent movie in the comfort of their own home for about $5. The only thing that was needed to complete the movie going experience was the popcorn, which frugal families bought at Costco by the caseload. Those who were less thrifty could buy a box of microwave popcorn at the checkout counter of the video store. The $25 cost of a Friday night date was reduced to roughly $6.

Blockbusters kept people on the couches and out of the movie theaters. Television had already put a damper on movie-going. In 1930, 65 percent of the population went to the movies once a week. By 1964, the number dropped to 10 percent. Despite the introduction of 3D projection technology and movie theaters offering added features such as in-seat dining, movie attendance is now at its lowest point since 1992.

Blockbuster was a transformational business on the entertainment landscape. Today, the company is gone. Streaming technology combined with an “all you can eat” subscription model killed it. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1: As Blockbuster stock declined, Netflix’s grew.

Just as Blockbuster did away with the need to go to a movie house to see a film, Netflix, Amazon and other video streaming services did away with the need to leave the house to get the evening’s entertainment. America stayed home and enjoyed movies on the internet for a fixed monthly fee. Blockbuster went out of business.

Netflix employs around 5,500 people with gross yearly sales of $11.69 billion. Blockbuster’s gross sales in 2004 were $6 billlion. It’s astounding that Netflix does almost twice as much business as Blockbuster did at its height, with less than 10 percent of the Blockbuster workforce. Such is the benefit of automation.

Whereas Blockbuster needed to staff a store in every neighborhood to do business, Netflix and other streaming services work from a central, virtual location without the added expense of redundant staffing. Blockbuster had 9,000 cash registers to man. Netflix has one, which is run by some sort of AI.

So, where did all the out of work clerks and store managers go? Hopefully, they went on to other jobs, maybe ones that were far better than the day-in, day-out tasks that go with processing video cassette rentals. After all, that’s the conventional wisdom: There will always be new jobs to take the place of the ones eliminated by automation. But, let’s face a cruel truth: It takes a lot more knowledge and skill to work on video delivery at Netflix than it does to check out customer purchases at Blockbuster. And Netflix requires fewer people to make the business go. Would a Blockbuster employee in Sioux City, Iowa, have the skills and mobility necessary to go on to to work at Netflix in Los Gatos, California? Seems pretty far-fetched.

Right now, things are pretty rosy in terms of the economy. So the conventional wisdom prevails: As automation eliminates one job, another new type of job takes its place.

Yet, there is another way to look at it. There are good arguments to be made:
- As automation eliminates jobs in the modern world, new jobs for humans will NOT be created at levels required to keep a workforce fully employed. Rather, AI will do more and require less.
- The lead up to large-scale unemployment will not be slow. It will happen fast, over a period of a year or two. And, it very well might happen within a decade rather than decades in the future.
Blockbuster’s demise came about pretty quickly. The company was at its peak in 2004. Six years later it filed for bankruptcy with $1 billion in debt. The music retailer Virgin Megastore closed its last North American store in 2009, a year after music streaming Spotify went public on the internet. (Spotify generated $3.8 billion in revenue in 2016 with an employee count of 2,162.)

Productivity due to automation continues to accelerate. In the early 1980s, it took 10.4 man-hours of labor to make a ton of steel. By 2014, the number was down to 1.9 man-hours per ton. The increase in productivity is due to increased levels of automation (think: robots). Given the choice between buying a machine and hiring a worker, companies are more likely to choose the machine. Thus, it’s entirely possible to imagine that the day when a few humans will be supervising the work of many robots making steel is close. Not too soon after that, a single human will be supervising an entire robotic workforce. Then, finally, as AI continues to improve and further dominate the production landscape, no humans will be required. The robots will supervise themselves.

How far off in the future is this time? Dunno. But I can tell you that robots are now assisting with surgery on humans. How long will it be until one surgeon can use automation to do the work of 10? Then, how long will it be until AI can do surgery unsupervised, five years? Ten years? Only 10 years ago driverless cars were still on the test tracks; today they are roaming the streets of Mountain View, California. An autonomous robot with a scalpel is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Once AI can do surgery unassisted, where will all the displaced surgeons find work? Maybe a few will go into research. What of the others?

At one time there were 200,000 horses in the City of New York. They provided the labor for a good part of the city’s transportation system. Today there are fewer than 1,000 horses. Cars, trucks, planes and trains have taken over. There’s no benefit to employing a horse when a car can do the work better. As General AI continues to develop and improve its ability to connect the dots as only a human can, how long will it be until the labor of most humans is not needed? What will it be like when there is no benefit to employing large parts of the human population because a machine can do the work better? Yes, the ramifications are scary. But, the possibility needs to be considered. The sad fact is that few people are considering such a scenario, let alone coming up with ways to address the impact on the horizon. Saying there will always be employment for humans is an avoidance mechanism, particularly given the fact that modern machines are going beyond purely mechanical labor and doing more thinking work.

In 1990, people thought there would always be movie rental until there wasn’t. In 2000, people thought there would always be a Virgin Megastore until there wasn’t. Today, Sears keeps closing stores. It will soon be gone from the face of the earth. Yes, Amazon is opening brick and mortar stores. This might be good news. But the fact that these stores are highly automated and have few employees cancels out the good feelings of the moment.

These days when a company comes to an end, it’s not a drawn-out process. It happens fast, over a period of a year. Many of the people left behind are confronted with low-wage, “show up and do it” jobs. The more educated have access to a pool of better paying work that comes with an excruciatingly steep learning curve. Whether the job is low-wage retail work or high-paying tech work, each worker is—or will be—competing against AI-powered automation that can—or will—do the job better.

It’s not a pretty picture. But it is one that can avoided if we decide to think about alternatives and put those ideas into action. Sadly, there are more people thinking about how to get to Mars than solving the problem of unemployment on a massive scale due to the proliferation of industrial automation powered by general AI. The problem is that we still seem to be stuck at, “There will always be jobs to replace the ones eliminated by automation.” To say otherwise is deemed Cassandra talk. Maybe so. But to not give the problem consideration is beyond folly. It’s a danger that will exact a heavy price from everyone who has to work to earn a living.

— Bob Reselman
March 19, 2018
An Unanticipated Obstacle to Full Automation

I’ve been concerned about the impact of automation on human employment for a while. My research activity started after November 2016, when I decided I needed to learn whether the much-touted phrase, “We’re bringing back the jobs,” was valid or not.

While it is true that some jobs in the United States have been exported to other countries, a study coming out of Ball State University in Indiana asserts that 88 percent of the jobs lost by U.S. workers is due to automation. Combine this study with the one published in 2013 by Frey and Osborne out of Oxford University that says that 47 percent of the jobs in the United States are risk, then things don’t look so rosy. Martin Ford, in his book, “Rise of the Robots,” goes so far as to say that every occupation is at risk, not just low wage workers who are paid to do repetitive tasks that are easy to learn. Not only will we have machines flipping burgers, they’ll also be perusing volumes of legal documents during discovery processes, which is the type of work that now is done by paralegals and newly hired law school graduates.

Machines are getting smarter all the time and they are getting cheaper. You can buy Baxter, a full fledged factory robot, for $22,000. Baxter can work 24/7 and is not subject to OSHA laws or workers’ compensation coverage.

Software? That’s getting cheaper, too. Every day, another open-source project is made available on GitHub that allows anybody with a computer and connection to the internet to take advantage of the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning. You want Swift code for artificial intelligence? No problem. It’s on GitHub and available to all for free! Want to convert your English ReadMe into Japanese? Simple, just use an API such as Microsoft Translator or Google Cloud Translate.

Given the current trends in technology, it’s not hard to imagine that within the next 15 years to 20 years we’re going to have a world in which fewer people are employed. This future scenario worries me.

About a week ago I was sharing my concerns with Chris Surdak at Surdak and Company. Chris works with large corporations implementing robotic process automation (RPA). He is also on the board of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence. Chris is at the front lines of using robotics and artificial intelligence to increase commercial efficiency. He and I share a concern about the wave of worker displacement we see on the employment horizon. However, Chris has an interesting take: While he agrees that automation is going to cause significant displace of human workers, he sees an obstacle.

Imagine you are an executive in a corporation and you have 5000 people under you. One day someone like me tells you that you can replace 80 percent of your workers, 4000 people, by streamlining your work processes using robotics and artificial intelligence. You should be ecstatic, right? That is a significant cost savings that is going to directly affect your bottom line.

But, it doesn’t work that way because that is not how many corporate managers think. They want to keep their jobs and in order to do so they need two things: headcount and budget. So, if I come along and tell them that I can create an efficiency that is effectively going to cost them power (less employees and a smaller budget to manage) and maybe their jobs, do you think they are going to jump on board right away? Nope. In fact, they are going to do everything that can to slow down my work until they retire.

Chris’s statement was a revelation to me. Previously, I thought corporations in their continual quest to seek greater profits will do whatever is required to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Most of us who do tech, particularly in DevOps, have embraced this notion. Automation is our friend. We’re lazy. We want the code and machines to do the heavy lifting. And, we’ve created environment where automation is necessary, For example, large-scale container deployment alone went beyond the capabilities of human management a long time ago.

There is a good argument to be made that the factory floor has not had problems using machine automation to improve efficiency. Factories have looked for improved efficiency via tooling since before industrial textile mills used water wheels to power their looms. But, there are other industries that are risk-averse and slow to change; insurance, for instance. The virtue of an industry such as insurance is that it’s ingrained in its culture to manage risk and to be measured when considering change. After all, would you want your retirement annuity to be subject to the whims of a day trader? No. You want your money well-protected by a cautious steward. However, with such safety comes inertia. Thus, there is an intrinsic resistance to change in general and automation in particular. Add in a culture of self preservation on the part of management and … well, you get the picture.

So there are industries that will be resistant—for a while, anyway. Then one of two things will happen. The companies that are not resistant to automation will enjoy the efficiencies the technologies bring. They will gain market share by providing a better product at lower cost and they will trample out the competition—think Uber and the taxi industry. Or, those resistant corporations will realize that to survive, managers who manage by “saving my job” will be given a golden parachute after revealing all the tribal knowledge hidden in their work groups. (Undocumented rules and processes are the bane of process engineers when implementing automation.) Either way, the march of automation will continue and workers will be displaced.

Given the increasing rate at which jobs are being replaced by automation, will these displaced workers find other jobs? This question I leave to you to answer.

— Bob Reselman

April 21, 2017