That’s Men: As machines take over, what are people for?

When I was in secondary school I got a summer job testing wheat in Leinster Mills, near Naas. Farmers brought their wheat from the fields, I stuck a metal tube in some of the sacks, took out a sample of wheat and ground it. Then I mixed the ground wheat with water in a glass tube, rested a metal plunger on top and measured how much time it took for it to get to the bottom. In that way the moisture content of the wheat could be estimated and this determined the amount paid to the farmer.

One day a man from the Department of Agriculture brought in a new machine. The machine knew exactly how to mix the ground wheat and the water, exactly where to put the plunger, exactly how much pressure to put on it and, therefore, could produce a reliable measurement. It didn’t need me fussing about in my white coat.

The man from the department said to my boss, with what approached joy: “It eliminates the human element. ”

This, it was clear, was seen as a good thing. Philosophical questions such as “What are people for?” didn’t bother any of us in that small room by the side of a canal which was itself a remnant of a vanished commerce.

But it’s a question that’s going to bother us in the near future. That’s what struck me when I read that the authors of an Oxford University study on the future of employment have estimated that as many as 47 per cent of jobs in the US may be at risk from computerisation.

“We find that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are likely to be substituted by computer capital,” they write.

Driverless trucks

Does the idea of driverless trucks barrelling down the motorway seem far-fetched? Then consider how comfortable we are already with the knowledge that the planes we travel in fly themselves most of the time.

According to the study, administrative jobs will go and so will the work of paralegals and legal assistants. Services, sales and construction will also see a loss of jobs to technology.

So what are people for? What is education for? Yes, highly educated people doing high-level, complex tasks will still be in demand but there is a limit to the availability of such work. Moreover, we can’t all be highly educated or highly intelligent.

So what will people do? Fight wars maybe – though the development of autonomous fighting machines that can slaughter without the help of people is well advanced. Make art maybe – but the Oxford authors note that computers can write music. Anyway, there’s no money in the arts.

We can dodge some of these questions by blaming unemployed people for being unemployed and by maintaining, as we often do now, that they just need to be “incentivised” to find work. But sooner or later even that approach will fail as we are forced to acknowledge that, for many, there just is no work.

Working for nothing

Perhaps more and more people will work for nothing. A huge amount of the work produced on the internet is free, including blogging, software programming and citizen journalism. But people have to live too. How will they put a roof over their heads and food on the table?

All of this has been gathering pace for a long time, of course. Swathes of jobs have disappeared in many industries. Jobs used to be replaced by other jobs, though often in lower-paid service employments. Now it’s by no means assured that the disappearing jobs will be replaced by anything new.

So what are people for? That’s a question the babies born in our maternity hospitals today will face in a real and pressing way in adult life.

The Oxford report, The Future of Employment, is written by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne and can be downloaded from bit.ly/futureofjobs

Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email