Robots do not pay taxes
(Concluded from Part 1, yesterday.)
(From “Automation and Business Darwinism,” at https://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/travel2.html)
In order to provide a snapshot of the automation of work, I chose to study a corporate travel magazine during the years 1996 to 1998 — the Business Travel News or BTN.
Trade magazines like it are all that are available to a contemporary researcher who wishes to follow corporate decision-making. Future historians will have access to the memoirs of corporate insiders and their correspondence, but we have only the pages of trade publications to give us hints of what is occurring.
In most trade publications, one must interpret nuances, but BTN openly discussed the industry’s plans to eliminate the corporate travel agent, a middleman, from the travel scene. In fact the magazine was a steady technology booster.
What we will hear in these pages is corporate travel decision-makers urging the automation of entire industrial occupations – the corporate agent and the airlines reservationist – both booking agents, though providing different mixes of services and working for different employers. In considering this scenario, I ask us to reflect on its deeper meaning.
The displacement of the corporate travel agent and airline reservationist being discussed in the pages of BTN was not an unforeseen or unintended consequence of the automation process. It was foreseen and intended. In fact, corporate travel will be heard here to demand the tools that will bring to pass the demise of the corporate travel agent.
Allowing the significance of this to sink in may take time. Beside this desire to dislodge whole job classifications from employment, the smaller events of the automation process pale.
People are applying automation elsewhere and its effects are equally severe. I could have examined the automation of the medical lab and the demise of the lab technician, or the automation of the pulp mill control room and the demise of the process control staff, or the automation of printing and the demise of the printing trades. I could have looked at so many occupations today and the number of endangered occupations will grow daily.
The jobs that are lost — the occupations that are lost really — are lost permanently. They don’t return with good times. Corporate travel agents won’t simply move from one company to another. They’ll wake up one week and find their occupation gone, “no longer needed.”
They’ll be obliged to retrain and re-enter another occupation. Those without means may find they must accept work at a lesser pay. Some may tumble down the economic ladder. Obsolescent people will find themselves competing with more and more displaced workers, many of them training to enter fields that are already beset by automation.
The ripple effects will further weaken general employment conditions and benefits and slacken demand for workers as it builds what was once called “the reserve army of labor” (that is, the ranks of the unemployed), creating a buyer’s market for labor.
If we’re fully to rouse ourselves from our fascination with computers to see some of their harmful side effects, we must stop a minute and consider two paradoxes that lie at the heart of technology. The first paradox is that computers have the power to help or harm, cause gain or loss. How we use them determines whether they will benefit or injure us.
People can be found who rave about them. Others can be found who curse them. Seldom do we consider that both arguments have merit.
At best, we see technology from one vantage point only: we’re boosters or critics. Like so many paradoxes, this one can only be resolved by us holding its two conflicting sides in our minds at one and the same time. Seeing only how they help us, we remain blind to their damaging side effects. Seeing only how they harm us, we fail to understand why automation continues to be used and the appeal it has for so many.
Avid technology boosters and reckless Luddites equally miss arriving at a wise and appropriate solution to the problem that automation presents us. Eventually, as a society, we’ll have to devise standards by which to judge what automation is wise and appropriate and what is not.
To hold both sides of the equation in one’s mind for understanding is not to countenance harm. Technology does harm some workers, as we’ll see. In a free democracy, the right of someone to act is restrained exactly at that point where one’s actions harm another. Although technology has helped us and will continue to help us in the future, when it harms another, it too must be introduced and used wisely.
We escape from the paradox that technology is when we acknowledge that it can help or harm, and that when it harms it’s being used inappropriately. This look at BTN shows men and women discussing an inappropriate use of automated technology. Let it be the first photograph pinned to the “missing persons” bulletin board: technology here has injured the corporate travel agent and airline reservationist; that harm and its continuance must be addressed.
The second paradox of technology concerns its social impact. At first, automating processes makes corporations more profitable. A bank can accomplish many more previously-manual operations using automated teller machines and pay no wages, pensions, benefits, employment insurance premiums, and so on.
But eventually firms are “hollowed out.” Pay levels remain static or decrease. Employee morale wanes. The debt-ridden young cannot find any but dead-end jobs at low pay. Many people at the peak of their career or nearing retirement are dislodged from work. Employment insurance payments are used up and still no work is found.
A growing gap opens up between rich and poor. Consumption levels drop and then businesses begin to feel the pain as well. Some businesses fall as consumer demand declines. The combination of business Darwinism and the automation of work will bring widespread suffering to the automated and the automater alike.
To be sure, automation remains only one cause of the dislocation we face; there are many more. As a globe, entire regional economies like Southeast Asia are under stress; entire nations like Japan and Indonesia are affected by official and criminal corruption, sometimes at the highest levels.
I’m not claiming that automation is a single-factor explanation for our woes or that by addressing it we’ve found a silver bullet. I’m saying that automation, if it continues to be applied inappropriately, will capture ever increasing amounts of work until large numbers of us will be left unemployed, employed only on contract or part-time basis, or overemployed and underpaid on several low-paying jobs. Automation will bring stress to both the idle and the overworked. It promises not to enrich the greatest number of us; it threatens to impoverish us.
The situation I describe is serious. My cast of mind in approaching it is serious. Nonetheless, as you will see at the conclusion of this study, I’m an optimist about the future. I have full faith that our democratic institutions will right themselves before grave damage is done.
Please allow the corporate-travel process typified here to stand for the automation process in general. Let the suffering ahead for the corporate travel agent and airline reservationist speak to you on behalf of all who suffer from obsolescence and displacement. Join me then in listening to the corporate travel sector discuss how to “bypass the middleman.”
(Next)