Dead End Jobs: The History of Technological Unemployment

Occupational Hazards

A recent McKinsey report analyzed 800 occupations in 46 countries and estimated that between 400 million and 800 million jobs could be lost due to robotic automation by the year 2030. So, do we resist innovation and progress only to picket outside of Skynet’s world headquarters? Or should we simply welcome our new robot overlords and hope we remain on the payroll? For many, that answer does not compute. 

Technological unemployment, or job loss due to advancements in technology innovation and automation, is nothing new, just ask the lamplighter. Before self-driving cars, delivery drones and robotic assembly lines, there was the invention of the railroad, the telephone, the electric street light and before that, the invention of the wheel - all of which caused mass disruption in the labor force. 

Wicked Weaves 

Much like the innovations that led to dying professions, the philosophy surrounding technological unemployment has been centuries in the making. In 350 BCE, Aristotle stated, “[If] the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.” In short, if humans were sophisticated enough to build machines to outpace human efforts, slavery and the work therein, would become obsolete.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution in England where technophobia surrounding the very weaving innovations Aristotle had prophesied reached a breaking point. In 1811, skilled weavers and textile workers known as Luddites feared that mechanizing manufacturing and the unskilled laborers operating the new looms would rob them of their means of income. The Luddites literally raged against the machine, burning down factories and smashing stocking frames and other mechanical instruments used by unskilled, low-wage laborers to deter further investment in the technology. 

The British government quashed the rebellion, at one point deploying more soldiers to fight the Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula. Their legacy still lives on today - Luddite now being a term used to describe individuals who are opposed to new technology or ways of working. 

Graveyard Shifts  

Technological unemployment began to snowball during the United States’ own Industrial Revolution. Dramatic developments in transportation, manufacturing and communication transformed the landscape of North America; doubly leaving behind old-world professions and introducing new ones into the workforce in the process. 

For centuries, the easiest way to move logs over long distances was rolling them down the river; these log drivers would travel in front of the logs to remove obstacles present along the way, while others trailed behind to free those stuck along the route. Due to the dangerous nature of the work, log drivers would often fall into the water or be crushed to death between rolling piles of timber. Understandably, they were actually paid higher than the men who cut down the trees they were transporting. Cheaper productions of steel and the electric railroad sparked the rapid expansion of railways around the world and log operators lumbered off into obscurity. 

Photo credit: Superior National Forest [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Before refrigeration, keeping food properly cold required both an icebox and ice provided by specialized ice cutters. These highly-skilled craftsmen would go out onto frozen lakes, rivers and ponds, scoring the ice and cutting it through with a horse-drawn machine to then make the final cuts by hand. The first commercial ice-making machine was invented in 1854, followed by the refrigerated rail car in 1868, and the ice cutting business all but melted away. 

By transmitting information quickly over long distances, the invention of the telegraph in 1832 further facilitated the growth in railroads, reducing information costs between businesses isolated by distant terrain. Additional improvements by the Pacific Telegraph Company led to the building of telegraph lines from coast to coast. As a result, the short-lived Pony Express realized they may have bet on the wrong horse for their job security. 

Personal home telegraph machines were scarce and people had to travel to a nearby telegraph office to check on Grandma, requiring a skilled operator with the knowledge of Morse code to transcribe the message for you. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell secured the first U.S. patent for the telephone and (you might be sensing a pattern here) the telegraph operators were left on read. If you have an appetite for the old-school, you can actually still send your own telegram today via iTelegram (sans Telegram operator, of course), but it’ll cost you $25 plus 88 cents per word for priority between the coasts. May we suggest a text instead?

As America entered the Information Age in the late 20th century, digital automation prompted a new crop of jobs to ride off into the sunset. Before commercial digital recording devices in 1971, Dictaphone operators would endure the tedious process of listening into meetings via headphones and typing out what was discussed. Copy boys would be sent on errands to take papers from desk to desk prior to the development of email systems in 1972. Elevator attendants, lecterns and switch-board operators would soon follow suit. 

The steward of your home entertainment experience would still be the VCR repairman today if not for the leap to laser disc in 1993. DVDs breathed new life into video stores like Blockbuster who operated nearly 9,000 retailers at its peak in 2004. To compete with rival Netflix, Blockbuster launched their own by-mail rental service the same year, resulting in the cannibalization of their own brick and mortar strategy. Netflix made the jump to streaming in 2010 and Blockbuster faced it’s final curtain call shortly after. In 2013, the former content king shuttered their remaining 300 stores, displacing 2,800 employees in the process. 

Photo Credit: Stu pendousmat at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Clocking In

The World Economic Forum estimated that 65% of children who entered primary school in 2016 will ultimately end up working in completely new roles and spaces we’ve yet to create. The 21st century has already seen new types of jobs start to appear, replacing those that were lost to modern innovation. The iPhone, the modern interpretation of Graham Bell’s telegraph-killer, provides access to over 2 million applications at your fingerprints - built by the 12 million mobile app developers whose jobs didn’t even exist a few years ago. 

Cloud service specialists, A.I. engineers, sustainability officers, Uber drivers and even paid bloggers have only recently been introduced to the job market this millenium. Renewable energy is booming as well: The Solar Foundation reports solar jobs increased more than 20% in 29 US states during 2018. The same report estimates that America’s two fastest-growing jobs through 2026 will be solar installers (105% growth) and wind technicians (96% growth). 

I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That. 

Robotic automation and AI still linger as the shiny, chrome elephant in the room. But, fear not. If innovators continually push to develop new and better technologies to increase productivity, someone still needs to be around to actually develop them. Oxford Professors Frey and Osborne emphasize that roles requiring skills in dexterity, creativity and/or social intelligence are far from expendable - decades away from coming close to automation due to engineering bottlenecks. Cartographers, nurse practitioners and first-line supervisors are simply not the droids we’re looking for. 

Frey and Osborne also observed that machine substitution of human labor has taken place almost exclusively in occupations with "routine tasks involving explicit rule-based activities." Like the log drivers and ice cutters before them, specialized jobs based around repetitive tasks may be most susceptible to automation, yet every good robot replacement in the world will still be just as specialized as their predecessor. Robots are only good at doing one human job - or, at most, a handful of well-defined jobs. Viral videos from Boston Dynamics depicting their free-running automatons may make for great Sci-Fi fodder, but today there is still no such thing as a good generalist robot - let alone the Terminator - and ultimately, we’re not even close. 

The more monotonous and hazardous labor we offload to machines will make our lives that much more fulfilling and, most importantly, more human in the process. If implemented wisely, automation has the potential to provide an environment for humanity to enjoy higher standards of living, foster creativity and become closer as a species. As Aristotle once said, “The end of labor is to gain leisure”. If humans have access to the jobs they’ll actually love, you won’t have to “work” a day in your life. 

This piece is powered by Wonder, an on-demand knowledge service that allows you to gain unique insights to any question in as little as 24-48 hours.
Check out the original research here.