Technological unemployment

The JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. Go Premium Technology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

One of the great dogmas.

As articulated by Keynes: “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”. It is fairly obvious that this can only ever be a temporary effect: the possibilities by freeing labour up from one occupation to do anything else must mean in the long run there can be no technological unemployment.

People who believe the contrary are struck by a lack of imagination: as if there is only one way you could do things, which is how you are doing them now. The whole edifice of technological development is founded on that being utterly wrong: Did Apple, when they invented the iPhone, anticipate all the applications to which it could be put? has the iPhone destroyed, or created, commercial activity?

Indeed technology threatens those who seek to operationalise labour - taking the easy, algorithmic bits, that could - and really, (if reg tech was any good, already should be done by robots.

Operationalisation is the process of trying to render the cosmic mundane - it is to ask to be superseded by robots, as you drive your business model, and your margins, into the ground.

But, yet, yet, yet: one thing we know technology will do is lower the barriers to interaction and communication. And one thing we know that the great huddled masses of mercantile foot-soldiers like to do is talk — as much as possible, and about as little of moment as possible. Visit LinkedIn, or Twitter if you really need persuading of this. There is an equilibrium of sorts between the need to get stuff done and the need to vent your own opinions, and until that Berners-Lee fellow ruined everything, it was set quite delicately at a place where, for most of us, while achieving anything was hard, finding people to listen to your opinions was even harder, so we spent most of our time in morose silence slugging away at a hard rockface with an old, soft-bristled, toothbrush. We had collected enough chips of slate to keep our employers happy and take a bit home to keep the hungry mouths around the Formica table passably filled with baked beans.

See also

• Operationalisation