Automation anxiety and the future of IT

Every new day finds a fresh, still more breathless report about how robots, Artificial Intelligence and IT generally are poised to take up to half of all jobs in the West. The latest blockbuster, running to 112 pages, gets the pompous title TOMORROW’S DIGITALLY ENABLED WORKFORCE: Megatrends and scenarios for jobs and employment in Australia over the coming twenty years. Dated January 2016 but – inevitably – published a month late, it comes from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and predicts that, as compensation for computer-generated joblessness, there will be lots of new posts for personalised preventative health helpers, online chaperones, and, oddly, ‘bigger big data analysts’. In the usual style of technological determinism, we learn that digital technology has also ‘unleashed’ many photographers, as well as 35,000 Aussie graphic designers in the past 20 years.

Ah – so it is not capitalism, management, government policy or Chinese markets that controls employment prospects in Oz, but IT. This is a very convenient doctrine; but designers should eschew it. Why? Well, just before CSIRO released its report, it fired 350 people in basic research posts, preferring what The Australian called ‘the hunt for commercial solutions’.

There we have it. It was human beings, not IT, that fired human beings. And when CSIRO demoted long-term, fundamental research tasks, the organisation also made much less likely the building of brand new industries, industries more substantial than its hoped-for ‘online chaperones’, industries that could more than compensate for the wildly overestimated technological unemployment that every trendy sage likes to forecast nowadays.

Designers need to realise a few home truths about the economics of the West. In Britain and America, gross capital formation runs at less than 20 per cent of GDP, which means that investment is very low (it’s been higher in Oz, mainly because of China-induced mining). Indeed, as a percentage of GDP, private fixed investment in information processing equipment and software as fallen in the US – from 4.7 per cent in 2000 to less than 3.5 per cent in 2014, which actually amounts to a drop of more than 33 per cent.

Meanwhile unemployment is modest. In January, the rate in the US was 4.9 per cent, the lowest level since February 2008; In the UK the figure was 5.1 per cent, the lowest since 2005; in Australia, unemployment has been rising since 2011 – but only from five per cent in 2011 to six today. So why all the premonitions of jobs doom, as well as further inequality, at the hands of IT?

What has happened is that we have turned the politics and economics of technology – which, incidentally, is now widely but wrongly thought to mean just information technology – from a human construct into a thing. So fear, fatalism and exaggeration of technological advance dominate our visions of the future. Apple’s SIRI speech-to-text software is equated with human intelligence, humanoid robots with humans, IBM’s Watson computer with a sentient being. The hatred of mankind that surged around 2008 with apprehensions about climate change has now morphed into a more general decrying of human abilities.

Until someone breaks the spell, designers can expect a lot more of this BS. But designers can do much to clarify matters. They can ask: could a machine ever dream up Paul Rand’s corporate identity for IBM, or Thomas Heatherwick’s garden bridge for London? Could a machine ever have the kind of intelligence to make the aesthetic, ethical, intuitive and future-creating judgments of a designer?

In the design process, designers asking themselves how they feel about their work, and also about how society might feel about it. Computers don’t do that. How could we ever give them that self-consciousness that designers display (sometimes, to the irritation of others)? When, like Watson, they wow millions by winning more quiz shows in the future, just how many extra chips will they need to know that they have won?

What designers might also point out is that it is not capital investment, but more human labour, and in particular more immigrant, women and older workers, which look likely to prop Western economies up in years to come. That has certainly been the pattern in the US and the UK. So the moral of this tale is: stop fretting about IT, start reaching out to new demographic segments in the design profession. Much more than the movement of electrons around semiconductors, it is they who will shape the destiny of design.