Actually, that’s not true. James Comey's ego is the most direct factor in Trump’s win, followed by Putin's hacker army, but for those who insist on going to the “white working class feeling hopeless” angle, then yeah. This. This is the wellspring of that problem.
Call it Amazon.com’s driverless store.
The tech giant has built a convenience store in downtown Seattle that deploys a gaggle of technologies similar to those used in self-driving cars to allow shoppers to come in, grab items and walk out without going through a register.
Amazon is planning up to 2,000 of these stores. If their automation system works, don’t expect them to be alone. There are over 150,000 convenience stores in the United States, employing 2.3 million Americans. What Amazon is doing isn’t a threat to those jobs, it’s a promise. Those jobs are going away. So are the 1.7 million jobs to be replaced by driverless trucks.
Obviously, a single store still in testing and a few test trucks wandering the nation’s highways weren’t actually responsible for Trump’s victory. In fact here’s a far more accurate headline:
I’m the reason Trump won.
It wasn’t just me, but I certainly helped. For the last six years, my title has included the word “automation.” You can treat the position as “improving productivity” or even “increasing worker safety.” I’ve certainly pitched it that way. But there’s a better definition of what I and every other Director of Automation, Automation Architect, and Automation Engineer are up to: making jobs go away.
… our research suggests that as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages.
That train has already rolled through manufacturing industries. It’s not that someone in China is now doing every job that used to be in Allentown. It’s that no one is.
This was clear enough during the campaign, although no one seemed to want to say it.
A look at the numbers suggests that the country is having the wrong economic debate this year. Employment security won’t come from renegotiating trade deals, as Donald Trump said in a speech Monday in Detroit, or rebuilding infrastructure, as Hillary Clinton argued in Warren, Mich., on Thursday. These are palliatives.
The deeper problem facing the United States is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and “machine learning” systems.
If you’re thinking that the solution is to just retrain all those manufacturing workers—and the coming wave of drivers replaced by automated vehicles, and store workers replaced by automated stores— so they can all be happy, well-paid programmers, think again. The number of new jobs created by automation is tiny in comparison to the number that are eliminated. Minuscule. When someone gives you an analogy involving the buggy-whip industry, just whip them.
Automation. Kills. Jobs.
If automation actually created new programming and analyst positions at a rate anywhere close to the number of workers being removed from factories, mines, stores, and vehicles it wouldn’t be cost effective. It is. It’s extremely cost effective. Which is why it’s not going to stop.
Besides, it’s perfectly possible to automate much of the analysis—programming loop. Tech companies have been trying for decades, and they’re starting to have some success. There’s nothing magical about tech jobs that says they can’t also be automated.
Why aren’t companies being forced to pay more to their workers? They don’t have to. Automation is eating, eating, eating away at the need for workers, making sure that, no matter what the industry, it’s almost certain that there’s no shortage of qualified people. Trump voters may have turned their blame and anger toward black Americans, or brown Americans (a move helped by people who were very happy to aim their hate at traditional targets), but it’s the shiny metal ass of robot Americans that really deserved their ire.
Of course, automation isn’t a disease; it doesn’t spread on its own. Corporate executives make the choice to implement the systems. But they do it exactly for the reasons advertised—automation drives up productivity and profits, turning corporations into money funnels that allow those same execs to collect their bonuses from booting out surplussed workers.
So that growing gap between worker pay and executive pay? That’s also my fault.
When not making the magical new jobs argument, those cheering for automation will also pull out the Henry Ford story. You know, the one about Ford paying workers enough to afford his products. The idea being that companies can’t automate all their jobs, because someone has to buy their products.
There are two things wrong with that:
1) Companies don’t have to get rid of all their workers to cause enormous disruption. Scroll back up there where it says 45 percent of workers could be automated, and that’s with the tech that exists today. Imagine what that would mean to the economy. Imagine what it would mean if just half that many went out.
2) Sure they can automate all their jobs! Hey. There are other companies. Someone out there will pay our customers. ... We assume.
The problem that fed the Trump campaign is one that isn’t even close to demonstrating its full destructive potential. The basic nature of capitalism drives companies to seek increased productivity. Technological improvements are essentially removing the lid from productivity, and as companies get less and less timid about using that technology, productivity is soaring. That’s more product per person—which makes things cheap. Yea! And greatly decreases the need for people. Boo!
This isn’t a problem that can be solved through marginal adjustments of the tax rate, or temporary programs to boost road building. It’s not just affecting us, it’s affecting everyone. It’s the engine of the “oh, gosh, something is wrong, how about we try fascism for a change?” movement that’s going on around the world.
This is a fundamental challenge to both our political and economic system. One that calls for some radical solutions and a willingness to make rapid modifications to a system that’s worked for centuries, but can’t stand up to forces now squeezing in from all sides. Except … Trump.
So, anyway. How about that new automated store? Pretty cool, eh?