Whether its Amazon drones putting couriers out of business, AI-powered health checkers diagnosing patients in hospitals, or algorithms at Microsoft providing the perfect recipe for whisky, the growing threat of artificial intelligence (AI) as a global job killer has been a prevailing media story that seems just too good to be false.
But the rhetoric is not supported by most recent studies, which suggest that while skill shifts across all industries will certainly be considerable, net job loss over the next 15 years is likely to be negligible. How? Well, many assumptions imbedded in the “automageddon” narrative are highly questionable: that automation creates few jobs whether short or long term, that whole jobs can be automated, that the technology is perfectible, that organizations can seamlessly and quickly deploy AI, that human thought and action can be replicated, and that it is politically, socially and economically feasible to apply these technologies.
Then there are the macro factors. With ageing populations, productivity gaps and skills shortages predicted across many G20 countries, the real danger might be having too little, rather than too much, labour weighing down on our industries. Ironically, far from taking over, automation will be, most likely, just helping us to cope.
Our research, conducted at the London School of Economics’ Department of Management, looks at hundreds of AI deployments, and reinforces this contention by identifying one critical factor neglected by all previous studies. The amount of work to be done is not remaining stable, it is growing across all sectors, year on year, dramatically, and inexorably. The limits to work intensification, working smarter and applying high-performance practices are being tested and, frequently, found wanting. Amongst other goals, organizations are more likely using automation as a route to staying afloat, or doing much more with the same or slightly fewer staff.
Where is this dramatic increase in work coming from? Almost all automation and future of work studies to date routinely leave out three sources of considerable work growth over the next fifteen years.
The first is the exponential data explosion. Some estimates suggest that 90% of the world’s digital data was created in the last two years, and that the amount grows by a further 50% per year. 2025 will probably see ten times the data generated in 2016. Even if these are only ball park figures, they still raise an important question: how are we going to collect, store, process, analyze, and use data arriving in such colossal volumes? It implies a massive explosion of work, especially as data seems to create yet more data.
The other, largely unacknowledged source of work growth is the expansion of audit, regulation and bureaucracy, necessitated by the data explosion. Audit and regulation inevitably accompany high levels of distrust, the likelihood of market failure and increased demands for transparency – definitely the climate since the 2008 financial crash and the introduction of modern technologies.
A third source of more work is technology’s double-edged capacity to provide solutions that also create additional problems; for example, the internet created cybersecurity issues. The cost of cyberattacks was estimated at $445 billion in 2013 and rose dramatically beyond $700 billion in 2019. This has led to further technology solutions, of course, with the cybersecurity market growing from being worth $75 billion in 2015 to reach potentially $170 billion by 2020. Another example concerns fake news spread through social media, which has led to Facebook employing fact-checkers in 20 countries. In China, social media companies Sina Weibo, Baidu and Tencent vie with one another to create more censors, while Toutaio, the world’s most successful news app, had some 6000 news moderators by 2017.
There is also increasing evidence for the addictive properties of mobile devices, games, the internet, email and related technologies and applications. Such tech is often deliberately designed to support multitasking and constant interruption, at considerable cost to productivity levels at work. A 2015 CareerBuilder survey found smartphone, internet, social media and email amongst the five most cited workplace disrupters and productivity killers, and a 2018 Udemy survey found a third of Gen-Z employees admitted to using their smartphones for personal activities for up to two hours in the work day. The emerging evidence shows task-switching and constant interruption results in substantial performance costs. For peak performance, employees’ goals should be sustained, focused and given singular attention. Alter (2017) cites studies showing that 70% of office emails are read within six seconds of arriving, which is hugely disruptive given that it can take up to 25 minutes to become re-immersed in an interrupted task. In these ways, more technology is having complex, contradictory effects to the commonly-held perspective.
Far from the headlines a huge, if under-analyzed, work creation scheme may well be underway, to which automation will only be a part solution.
