While it is clear from my last several blogs that I believe that automation will drive a major restructuring of the world economy, I do not think that we are facing an end to work as we know it. As I argued in my last blog, driverless trucks will create new jobs and demand new organizational structures. This is similar to the changes that occurred with the introduction of standardized shipping containers a half century ago which actually increased longshoremen employment by integrating truck, rail and sea shipping thereby increasing the overall efficiency of the industry.[i]
I was at a presentation last week where an information technology prognosticator of some acclaim lamented the prospects for future employment. The picture he painted was one where everyone was replaced by an Alexa controlled robot. There was not a job in the universe that he saw as being safe from extinction. I just don’t see this world view/view of the future world as being credible. The world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, who will always be known as the one who lost to Big Blue (20 years ago!), states the position eloquently:
Waxing nostalgic about jobs lost to technology is little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many gravediggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights.[ii
Let me tell you why I think Kasparov is right.
First, as Kasparov notes in his article, advancing technology has always created more and new jobs than existed before. He offers a quick list including app designers, 3-D print engineers and genetic counselors. These displacements create short-term adjustment problems as universities and technical training programs adjust to new requirements and workers make their way through training. Unfortunately, these feedback loops are sometimes slow resulting in significant amounts of frictional unemployment. There are long-term adjustment problems as well since many workers do not want to be or cannot be retrained. This may justify, as I have argued in earlier posts, readjustment compensation for displaced workers.
Second, creativity is a uniquely human capability. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Tony McCaffrey (“There Will Always Be Limits to How Creative a Computer Can Be”) provides excellent analysis of this point. While AlphaGo, the latest computer program capable of beating world champions (the ancient game of Go in this case) was able to develop an almost unbeatable approach to beating world masters, its decision making patterns could not be either understood nor summarized for external review. How limiting is the factor? McCaffrey and his colleague Lee Spector developed a mathematical proof establishing that even the fastest computer cannot explore all of the options posed by a problem. Thus, there are serious limits on the ability of a computer program to analyze complex problems and understand how systems work. Work life is more than playing Go or Chess.
Third, computer programs in isolation may not even be the optimal strategy for winning Go and Chess. While much has been made of the inability of world masters to beat computer programs at board games, the success of individuals against computer programs in certain circumstances has received much less attention. Stephen Cramton and Zackary Stephen, a couple of amateur chess players, developed a computer program to assist them in playing chess. This combination of computer program and humans was able to win a tournament against both master level players and various computer programs.[iii] This is a very interesting result. It suggests not only that there are elements of chess strategy that are not well duplicated by a computer program but also that the social facilitation of group decision making that has been long documented in the group dynamics literature is still important in the age of automation.
What does this mean for logistics? We should be excited at the prospects of improved efficiencies that will be offered by artificial intelligence applications to mechanical tasks from driving trucks to operating warehouses. The optimal application of these technologies will involve computer programs serving as aids to the decision making and operating processes. The challenge will be to develop organizational structures that facilitate the synergy between decision makers and AI. It is clear to me, however, that the winners will be those organizations that can effectively orchestrate this combination.
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[i] Mark Levinson, The Box (2nd Edition). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
[ii] Garry Kasparov, “Learning to Love Intelligent Machines,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2017.
[iii] Chris Baraniuk, “The Cyborg Chess Players That Can’t Be Beaten,” BBC Future, December 4, 2015 (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151201-the-cyborg-chess-players-that-cant-be-beaten?ocid=ww.social.link.email).