What if the Unemployment Rate Were 90%

The Barista Question

The No-Barista Cafe: A fictional short-short story

How Coffee Shops Could Boil Their Frogs

Advice to Baristas -- They'll Soon Lose Their Jobs to Robots

Automaton: a short-short story

Why You Too Would Choose Bytes Over You...and what you can do to get and stay well-employed

A new Brookings study supports previous ones that automation will indeed take lots of jobs, and many of the remaining ones will require interacting substantively with technology.

My PsychologyToday.com article today talks about how to thrive or at least survive in our brave new world.

What Will Happen to the "Bottom Half?"

Predictions vary as to the percent of jobs that will be lost to automation, offshoring, and gigging but it’s likely to be between 20 and 60 percent within the next decade or two. 

Consensus is that much of the remaining decent-paying employment will demand ever more brainpower, technical chops, and communication skills. And with so many applicants available, employers will be able to insist also on people who are likeable, reliable, enthusiastic and healthy.

The Big Question is, what’s going to happen to the many millions of people who don’t get hired for those jobs? I fear that things will be different from previous technological waves in which new technologies, net, created more new jobs. I predict that because so much of the future economy will be based on digital products and services, which can be produced by the millions with a push of a button.
My PsychologyToday.com article today describes what will likely be a problemed existence for the "bottom half" and possible approaches to ameliorating the situation.

A Life at the 40th Percentile: A counter to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now

Johnny was average: looks, personality, and brains: He scored between the 30th and 50th percentile on most standardized tests, from the 2nd grade reading and math achievement test to the SAT.

Johnny went to community college and three courses short of his A.A., dropped out, in part because he had taken the required math course three times and couldn’t pass it.

He took a job at Evergreen Nursery, unpacking shipments, hauling soil to customers’ cars, answering customers’ questions, too often having to turn to the Sunset Garden Book.

After work, Johnny played schoolyard basketball or just vegged out, whether staring out the window at drifting clouds or at the snow falling, or cooking. He considered such activities as peeling potatoes or watching water come to a boil as meditative.

Johnny got promoted to assistant manager with an increase in pay to $15.25 an hour. But Home Depot’s, Lowe’s, and Wal-Mart’s selection and prices trumped too many customers’ desire to shop local and so Evergreen Nursery, like many mom-and-pops, closed.

Nervous, Johnny wanted a job fast so he applied to Home Depot and was hired as an assistant manager in its nursery department at $17.75 an hour. Although his nearest Home Depot was just two miles from his apartment, the nearest one that had an opening was seven miles away, and with the ever worsening traffic, it took him an hour each way—Mass transit would have taken him much longer still. As troubling, with the commute expense, Johnny was now making even less, net, than at Evergreen.

The good news was that the job was easier because he didn’t have to fill in with delivery unloading or soil carrying when employees called in sick. There were fork lifts and if a worker in the nursery department wasn’t there when a delivery arrived, the store manager would just reassign someone from another department.

And for a few years, all proceeded reasonably well. Although Johnny’s rent and other living expenses increased, he got small raises every six months and so remained solvent. He was even able to replace his 30-year-old 19” Magnavox TV with a 55” Scepter that Wal-Mart was selling for $279. He didn’t even have to, as he usually did, pay for it in installments. He bought it for cash.

On his 40th birthday, Johnny sat at his window, staring at the autumn leaves falling and saw his future as just hanging on and when the inevitable layoffs and then illness hit, there'd be no money for retirement, so he'd have to move to a welfare hotel and live on food stamps, and then possibly die early because of an overwhelmed health care system.

The U.S. alone has 150 million people at or below the 40th percentile, with an IQ of 90 or less. Meanwhile, the jobs such people used to hold are being ever-more automated, offshored, and converted into temp gigs. A McDonald’s in Phoenix has replaced clerks with kiosks and burger makers with robots. Amazon is only the most prominent of retailers that are automating warehouse work. There are farms in Japan with no workers. The Tesla factory floor has lots of big manufacturing machines and few humans. And the more benefits that government mandates, the more employee lawsuits, the faster employers will replace U.S. workers.

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a hot book, indeed is Bill Gates’ favorite. It points out society’s progress but ignores important realities—like what’s going to happen to the world’s 3 billion Johnnys.

I read this on YouTube.

Sam's Saga: What a typical graduate's next 20 years is likely to be like

As my PsychologyToday.com contribution today, I offer a short-short story that projects what a new graduate's life over the next 20 years might be like.

Will Humans Be Necessary: Abridged and updated version

A while back, I wrote a long article, Will Humans Be Necessary?

As my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer a column-length and updated version.

How the End of Jobs Could Be a Good Thing

 

Most experts agree that automation and globalization will cause the loss of at least half of all jobs within the next couple of decades.

Many observers fear that will lead to massive unhappiness, civil unrest, or even Armageddon because people primally need work both to survive and for a sense of self.

I'm inclined to agree but that's a psychologically difficult future to live with, so I've been trying to come up a positive scenario. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers my best shot:

The Dejobbing of Society and What to Do About It

Over the past two years on my radio program , I've been talking to a range of experts on the future of work. Today, after reading a long cover story on the topic in The Atlantic, I decided to synthesize my thoughts in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Coping With Ever More Jobs Being Lost to Automation

After the Germanwings co-pilot's suicide/mass murder, CNN did a feature on the forthcoming pilotless airplanes. You've no doubt read ad nauseam about the accelerating replacement of humans with machines. In today's PsychologyToday.com article, I discuss how to cope, practically and psychologically.

The End of Jobs...Hurray?

This appeared in the April 2014 edition of the Mensa publication, The Intelligencer.

The End of Jobs…Hurray? 

by Marty Nemko

By now, everyone knows the unemployment rate severely masks the true employment situation. Not only does it not count people who have given up on looking for work, it doesn’t count the underemployed: for example, college-degree holders with jobs that don’t require a degree, or people working part-time/temp when they’d prefer a full-time, secure position.

Ever more jobs are automated. Bank teller jobs have been replaced by ATMs, supermarket cashier jobs by self-checkout, tolltakers by FastTrak. In the face of increased minimum wage and living wage ordinances, robotic fast-food preparers and servers have been developed: custom burger and burrito makers in California, sushi makers in Japan, cookie makers in Poland. The automated barista may replace that failsafe job—Starbucks barista. There’s a robot bookstore clerk and IBM is developing a robot retail clothing clerk.  Many but not all customers will prefer that to the $10 an hour pushy but often incompetent sales clerk. And retail employers will prefer not having to worry about employees taking sick days when not sick, being bad with customers, and/or quitting soon after being trained—turnover in retail is over 100 percent. Bartending jobs are at-risk. I just went to a dance at a venue where the bartender was a machine: stick your credit card in, pick your drink from the screen, and out it comes, just like from a soda vending machine. Leading companies such as Google, FedEx, and Amazon are investing big in driverless vehicles—bye-bye jobs as taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, even train engineers. Even home-building is at risk. 3D-printers are projected to be able to print homes out of concrete in under a day—bye-bye thousands of construction jobs.
 

And of course, there’s offshoring. While politicians keep urging more Americans to major in a tough science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) field, ever more of those tech jobs are being offshored, notably to India and China, which have a long tradition of valuing science, math, and technology, and populations many times the size of the U.S.’s. Already, there's an oversupply of STEM graduates. Evidence:THIS  and THIS and THIS and THIS.That can only accelerate as ever more work product can be sent over the internet. Ever more companies are figuring, “Why should I pay American wages plus Workers Comp, Disability, Social Security, ObamaCare, paid family leave, Americans with Disabilities Act compliance costs, plus that of ever increasing employee lawsuits, when I can get someone in Asia for a small fraction of the cost? Are American workers really so superior?”

In a TED talk, Dr. Thomas Frey, Google’s top-rated futurist speaker, projects that, by 2030, half of all jobs worldwide, two billion, will be lost. An Oxford University study projects that half of U.S. jobs will be lost just to automation. One could quibble with the percentage but our job security certainly will be at ever greater risk.

Then what will happen?

It’s easy to project a dystopian scenario: mass unemployment leading to mass destitution, armed robberies, and drug abuse to anesthetize the pain. 

But I thought it would be more interesting here to do a thought experiment in which the end of jobs would actually be a net positive for society.

With fewer people earning good incomes, only companies that provide basic products and services will thrive. That will be good for the environment. For example, car manufacturing will shrink and sell only affordable, economical cars. And people will repair and repair their old vehicles rather than buy new. Even if government takes over the airlines, the cost of planes, fuel, maintenance, and personnel will discourage people from flying. Again, good for the environment.

Also, today’s materialistic society tempts people to cut ethical corners to make more money so they can buy more stuff: new car, nicer clothes and jewelry, fancier vacations, live in 3,000 fancy square feet rather than 1,000 serviceable ones. In an economy in which fewer people are working let alone earning big bucks, materialism would be less core to societal values, reducing those pressures to be unethical.

Plus, with people having more time, more people will replace gratification from “stuff” with gratification from learning, creative arts, and in relationships from mentorship to family to involvement in pro-social organizations: from Rotary to SmileTrain to Mensa.

In the meantime
Even if you have a good job, might this column’s look at the future justify reconsidering your priorities? Yes, perhaps do more to secure your employment: upgrade your skills, work a little harder, build relationships with people who can abet your career, consider starting a business. But might replacing a materialistic lifestyle with a more meaningful one be good preparation not only for a scarce-jobs future but for your current life?