Today I’ll discuss two chapters of Thomas Friedman’s Thank You for Being Late that I found especially insightful: Ch. 8 on the implications of new technologies for employment, and Ch. 9 on the problem of global order.
The future of work
Friedman begins his discussion of work with a bold pronouncement: “Let’s get one thing straight: The robots are not destined to take all the jobs. That happens only if we let them–if we don’t accelerate innovation in the labor/education/start-up realms, if we don’t reimagine the whole conveyer belt from primary education to work and lifelong learning.”
I was pleased to find that Friedman’s position is similar to the one I laid out in my critique of Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots. Ford predicted a future of massive unemployment, with millions of displaced workers relying on government for a minimal income. We could get a taste of that during a transitional period, but I don’t think that’s a very good description of where we are ultimately headed.
Friedman doesn’t deny that smart machines can now perform many tasks currently or formerly performed by humans. But he makes a sharp distinction between automating tasks and automating whole jobs so as to eliminate the human contribution altogether. The upside of automation is increased productivity. Workers aided by new technologies can produce more per hour, reducing the unit cost of what they produce. That can create a larger market for the product, increasing the demand for labor in a given occupation. A car was an expensive luxury item before the assembly line cut costs to create a mass market and a booming industry. Friedman reports that “employment grows significantly faster in occupations that use computers more,” as in banking and paralegal work.
To give an example from my own experience, financial planning software has automated many of the most tedious tasks involved in preparing a retirement plan, such as mathematically projecting future income from savings rates and asset allocation choices. But that hasn’t resulted in a reduced need for financial planners. On the contrary, it has made the services of a planner affordable for more people. Planners can spend less time doing calculations but more time relating to their clients.
Friedman says, “Jobs are not going away, but the needed skills for good jobs are going up.” What are disappearing are well-paid jobs with only modest skill requirements, like twentieth-century manufacturing jobs.
Retooling education
In general, today’s good jobs require more education; yet it does not follow that a college education necessarily qualifies a person for a good job. That’s not because a liberal education is a waste of time, but because it is only a foundation that must be built upon with lifelong job-relevant learning.
Friedman quotes MIT economist David Autor, who stresses the need for more than one kind of learning: “If it’s just technical skill, there’s a reasonable chance it can be automated, and if it’s just being empathetic or flexible, there’s an infinite supply of people, so a job won’t be well paid. It’s the interaction of both that is virtuous.”
Friedman is a strong believer in a broad, basic education that includes “strong fundamentals in writing, reading, coding, and math; creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration; grit, self-motivation, and lifelong learning habits; and entrepreneurship and improvisation….” Even a robotics enthusiast like Martin Ford acknowledges that humans surpass robots in general intelligence, as opposed to specialized task capabilities.
However, recipients of this basic education will also have to cope with rapidly changing workplace requirements. Technology will play a central role here, both in creating the automated systems with which workers interact, and in enhancing learning processes themselves. Friedman wants to “turn AI into IA,” by which he means turning artificial intelligence into intelligent assistance to support lifelong learning. “Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement.” When the time comes to pick up a new skill, you can probably find an app to help you learn it.
Friedman describes AT&T as one company that is demanding more lifelong learning of its employees, but supporting it with measures like tuition reimbursements, online courses developed in collaboration with online providers, and promotions for those who acquire new skills. This represents a new social contract between employer and employee–“You can be a lifelong employee if you are ready to be a lifelong learner.”
Every major economic shift has involved the rise of a new asset class, such as land in the agrarian economy and physical capital in the industrial economy. The rising asset class today is human capital, and that is where society’s investments must be increasingly concentrated.
The threat of global disorder
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, The U.S. remained the only superpower and the most obvious model for other countries to emulate. Many thinkers expressed the hope that the world could move faster in the direction of American-style democracy and capitalism. But then the interventions in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan failed to produce stable democracies, the Great Recession called into question capitalist progress, and Americans lowered their expectations for world leadership.
What Friedman calls the post-post-Cold War world is characterized by shrinking American power, especially in the Middle East, and new challenges arising from the accelerations in technological change, globalization and environmental degradation. In large areas of the less developed world, the danger is that states will fail and societies will sink into disorder, dragging the global political order and economy down. Environmental disasters like deforestation in Central America or drought and desertification in sub-Sahara Africa are uprooting people from their traditional relationship to the land. And while some poorer countries are advancing by providing cheap labor to the global economy, the future may belong to those who can provide smarter labor, and that requires greater investments in human capital.
Friedman says that during the Cold War, superpower competition gave America a reason to assist developing countries, in order to keep them in our camp. The mid-twentieth century economic boom also gave us the means to do so. While many Americans are now inclined to turn their back on the rest of the world, Friedman makes a case for renewed global involvement: “While we cannot repair the wide World of Disorder on our own, we also cannot just ignore it. It metastasizes in an interdependent world. If we don’t visit the World of Disorder in the age of accelerations, it will visit us.” The dislocated people in failed states can become refugees or terrorists. The same technologies that can empower people to learn and produce more can empower them to build improvised explosive devices triggered by cell phones, or perhaps a weapon of mass destruction.
In Friedman’s view, the best thing the U.S. could do to “help stabilize the World of Disorder and widen the islands of decency” would be to help fund schools and universities. He would also like to see us help the poorest people make a living in their own villages by assisting them with their environmental problems. He points out that it costs only 100-300 dollars to restore a hectare of degraded land.
In a world of enhanced interdependence, the haves would do well to invest in the development of the have-nots, domestically and globally. If we do not rise together, we will very likely fall together.
Beneath the Surface 