A nice piece on the BBC website today illustrates the fallacy behind this idea that robots will make humans useless. The piece describes the creation of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program.
With VisiCalc’s introduction in 1979, 99% of the drudgery that accountants had to perform (or hire others to perform) in updating each cell in a spreadsheet by hand was eliminated overnight. And as a result, hundreds of thousands of accounting clerk jobs simply vanished.
Given that one of the Democratic presidential candidates is running on the fear that people will become obsolete and irrelevant to the economy, it is important to ask what happened to all of the accounting clerks. Are they still sitting around on the street, accosting you on your lunch break, offering some data entry in exchange for a cigarette?
Nope. As the BBC notes,
But Planet Money also found that there were 600,000 more jobs for regular accountants. After all, crunching numbers had become cheaper, more versatile, and more powerful, so demand went up.
You get the idea: Automation made both accounting services and the running of an accounting business easier and cheaper. Retail prices fell, making accounting accessible to more people, and more accountants became available, driving prices down further still, making it still more accessible, et cetera, et cetera.
The most famous example of this is the automation of transportation — the old horse and buggy problem. For every horse-team driver who might be able to adapt to a car, you had a team of stable hands and trainers and farmers producing feed who would no longer be needed in the era of the automobile. Yet, rather than put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, the widespread adoption of the automobile made both delivery and passenger services cheaper and more commonplace, creating the need for even more professional drivers than before. It also created the need for gas stations and auto mechanics and oil rigs and mines and the manufacturing of products that had never been necessary or thought of previously. The amount of work to be done once again increased.
A more modern example is the forgotten job of the filing clerk. Not long ago, every government agency and big business employed thousands of people whose sole job was to organize and retrieve files. In 1978, the Labor Department reported that nearly 20% of all American workers — 16.6 million in all — were clerks. Today, the number of clerks in our much larger modern economy is just over 3.1 million or less than 3% of the U.S. workforce. That’s because computers now do most clerical work for free.
But those 13.5 million workers and their jobs didn’t just disappear. Instead, new and profitable businesses were made possible because computers reduced the costs and drudgery of clerical work. Many of today’s small businesses would have been impossible to start in 1978 because because of the costs and complications involved in hiring receptionists, filing clerks, couriers, typists, researchers, schedulers, and others to perform basic functions that kept an office running at the time. Once a computer could do most of the work for free, the barriers to starting many new and innovative businesses had been removed. And those businesses in turn created millions of jobs that could not have existed or even been thought of in an environment of 1978 technology.
What about journalists? The rapid decline in journalism jobs over time is partly reflective of the old manufacturing aspect of the industry. It once took several teams of copy boys and typesetters to do the job that one person does today with a Mac. You even needed a darkroom! Now that drudgery is all gone, as are the thousands of jobs associated with it.
But now, automation is also creeping into news reporting. It’s most common in financial journalism, where computer-generated stories allow for coverage of far more events. Don’t underestimate automation’s value in sports. Even the scorekeeping app that we use to record and track my kid’s little league games automatically generates surprisingly detailed blow-by-blow newspaper-style articles about the games after they’re over.
To the extent that journalism lives on as we know it today, automation will probably help it generate more copy and cover more events with niche followings, while focusing available reporters and their brainpower on topics that are more analytical or investigative and generate broader interest. But I’d also argue that we’re already seeing many of those journalism jobs migrate to smaller ventures that some journalists look down upon. Think of all those people on YouTube, who write and discuss news and entertainment and financial topics and share their opinions. Some of them have created entire companies for the purpose. Why, some hire a staff larger than that of longstanding newspapers. Think of “The Young Turks,” Linus Tech Tips, Tim Pool, “Louder with Crowder,” or the Daily Wire. Anyone can now review a video game or complain about feminists or talk about living in modern China or describe the downsides of owning Apple products or of owning a home. And a few people, it turns out, are really good at it and can generate thousands of dollars a day in advertising revenue, either through YouTube itself or by attracting their own sponsors.
In short, automation doesn’t just chew up jobs. It also frees humanity to find better things to do, and humans constantly find new things they want to do and hire even more people to help do them. That’s how the free market has always worked, and it’s why, amid record automation, we are also experiencing the lowest employment rate in U.S. history.
