What makes a job automatable?

The report assesses automatability by looking at the percentage of an occupation that is spent doing data collecting and processing and routine, predictable physical work (highly automatable) vs. unpredictable physical work and interacting with stakeholders (less automatable) vs. applying expertise and managing others (hard to automate).

While there are exceptions, the majority of jobs that are not automatable or difficult to automate are those that require the most “human” skills—empathizing and communicating with other humans, exercising creativity, and thinking critically in ways computers can’t. Artists, astronomers, and historians are all safe from automation.

What skills make a job “robot-proof?”

Marketplace Morning Host David Brancaccio and producer Katie Long drove through the Midwest looking for people in occupations that are difficult to automate, and to think about how to educate and train people for robot-proof jobs.

That’s something that we at MFI have been thinking about for a while (search “automation” in our blog feed, or take a look through our posts on the skills that people need in the future, especially the “6 Cs” developed by Kathryn Hirsch-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff of creative innovation, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, content, and confidence). And it’s why we think our education system needs a major overhaul, especially here in Michigan.

In the Marketplace podcast, you can listen to Linda Spinelli talk about her HR job, where she has to gently probe and understand human behavior in complex scenarios. The job has rote elements but requires nuanced human interaction. Or a police officer in Ohio who describes the way he has to use his judgment to assess highly variable interactions with members of the community.

This ”robotization” of jobs is already well upon us. Our state is vulnerable to ongoing job loss in many sectors, while low-skilled “replacement” jobs are generally low-paid. With low college attainment rates—a college degree is a pretty good indicator that someone has non-automatable skills—we are going to continue to struggle, as a state, until we widely enhance the skills that we teach in our schools, and how ready our kids are for college. It’s worth taking a listen to the Marketplace podcast to grow your understanding of the types of skills and jobs that we need our kids to be prepared for. They might be very different from what you think.

You can take a quiz about automation and find the Marketplace podcasts (there is one now, and they plan to post three more, one per week) here.

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“A particular kind of human being”

The post by Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, about the increasing value of liberal arts degrees, is based on an understanding that Michigan Future shares about the new realities of our economy. Increasing globalization and automation mean that the greatest job security comes from being highly skilled in capacities that computers will not be able to replicate. Right now those uniquely human capacities include empathy and listening, creativity and innovation, and the ability to apply expertise in decision-making. Managing people and connecting knowledge to social interaction are not things computers will do. Drawing from a number of articles, Patel writes:

A computer can undoubtedly give you the right pill for pain, and a robot can provide electrical-stimulation treatment, but for the interaction, creativity, and judgment that a therapeutic conversation requires, a particular kind of human being is needed. Where are we going to get these knowledgeable and caring “relationship workers”?

The value of liberal arts degrees

Not only are these the jobs that are least susceptible to automation, they are also the jobs that are growing. A McKinsey report cited by Patel shows that between 2001 and 2009, jobs requiring human interaction grew by 4.8 million. Fortunately, liberal arts degrees, formerly the bogeyman of practically-minded parents, are already designed to prepare students for this impending economy. Patel goes on,

The hallmarks of a liberal education — building an ethical foundation that values the well-being of others, strengthening the mental muscles that allow you to acquire new knowledge quickly, and developing the skills to apply it effectively in rapidly shifting contexts — are not luxuries but necessities for preparing professionals for the coming transformation of knowledge work to relationship work.

Michigan’s education system, from pre-K to college and beyond, needs to be reflective of this reality. At every level, we need to be growing the skills in our people that our robots cannot replace.

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In this post I want to focus on his comments about how work is going to change, once again largely because of automation. Sasse explains in that presentation:

When hunter-gatherers became settled agrarian farmers that was pretty disruptive we didn’t have alphabets then so we don’t have a lot of record for what that looked like for the disruption for people. But the only analog we have for the moment in the transformation of work for this moment is the 50-75 year period that was industrialization.

And it was remarkably unsettling for people to go from almost everyone inheriting the farming job of your mom and dad and grandparents for generations to now migrate across the landscape and go to a city and have to get a totally different kind of job in a big tool economy. And as disruptive as that was – and it was, I mean it spawned progressivism in American politics that transformed both the Democratic and Republican parties under Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It was big and disruptive. But once you got a new job? You tended to still have that job until death or retirement. What we’re going to have now is everybody losing their job every 3-5 years for the rest of their existence. We’ve never had 40 and 45 and 50 and 55 year-olds disintermediated out of a job and have to get a new job at age 55. By and large if you lose your job now at age 55 you never get employed again.

In the future that’s not going to work because it’s going to be all of us. And that’s hugely – there’s tons of human turmoil. We can talk about Charles Murray and we can talk about Robert Putnam, we can talk about J.D. Vance’s new best-selling book on the shrinking of all those mediating institutions, but we’re not talking about the underpinning of all of that, which is the transformation of the economy and the nature of work from stable, life-long jobs to unstable, occasional, part-time, flex jobs where everyone’s going to have to become a life-long learner. (Emphasis added.)

So in Sasse’s view––and he is not alone––we are not only going to see a big change in the kind of jobs and occupations that the economy of today and tomorrow will offer, but in the nature of work. So jobs increasingly will go from goods producing (manufacturing,  construction, farming, mining, etc.) to service providing. And jobs will go from stable and life-long––and I would add primarily full time with benefits for an employer––to unstable, occasional, part-time, flex jobs––and I would add far more working for yourself where you are responsible for benefits rather than working for an employer––where everyone’s going to have to become a life-long learner. In addition to “everybody losing their job every 3-5 years for the rest of their existence”.

Talk about a radical transformation! My instinct is the obsolescence of jobs and occupations will not be as quick as every 3-5 years. But it’s clear jobs, occupations, and industries are going to continue to be less stable everyday going forward. And my instinct is that more of us than Sasse predicts for quite a while will be employed in full time jobs for an employer rather than in the gig economy. But clearly more and more of us––whether we want to or not–-or going to have to work in the “unstable, occasional, part-time, flex jobs” he describes.

Sasse’s argument is that this change in the work humans will do in the future and the way work will be organized are being driven by forces stronger than policy. That government doesn’t have the power to stop these changes. That, of course, is a belief we share at Michigan Future. That globalization, and particularly smarter and smarter machines are mega forces that––no matter what our politics are––will continuously reshape the economy and work.

Sasse concludes with “And we’re not wrestling with any of those questions and neither political party has an answer.” Exactly! What we desperately need is for both parties to acknowledge that Sasse is basically right. That there is no way back to the prosperous American economy of the 20th Century. And to get to work on ideas on how we have a prosperous economy––with a broad middle class––in the context of the new realities. Where good paying jobs are going to be predominantly knowledge-based and jobs and occupations are going to be less and less stable. Where as we describe it career success is going to be far more like rock climbing than ladder climbing.

Yes this is really scary. All of us would choose the old, more stable economy than the one Sasse describes. But Sasse is right its not a choice we have available to us. Both trying to make the old economy work again and leaving it up to each of us to fend for ourselves in this radical transformation are almost certainly a recipe for most of us getting poorer. What we need is politicians from across the political spectrum advancing ideas as big and disruptive as those that in Sasse’s words “spawned progressivism in American politics that transformed both the Democratic and Republican parties under Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson”. That policy response by both parties was essential to helping Americans thrive in the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. We need the same kind of bold policy transformation to help us thrive in the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy.

IMAGE SOURCE: © Gage Skidmore 

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Unfortunately, we’re not even good currently at helping to train unemployed Michiganders for the economy we already know, let alone the economy that’s coming. (No state in the U.S. really is, except when all that is needed is some fairly straightforward skill enhancement or credentialing.) We have been slow to understand—and many still do not—the degree to which automation and globalization are making jobs disappear, whose replacements require a wildly different set of skills. We need to fundamentally rethink how the state can support worker retraining that builds broad skills valued in the new economy.

Examples from other countries show us a couple of approaches that Michigan could take. In Singapore, the government works with employers to produce “industry transformation maps” that reflect expected changes the job market, and that are provided to individuals to help them choose which new skills to pursue. Additionally, the government offers generous subsidies to adults to pursue retraining programs at qualified providers. Singapore recognizes that changes are coming, works with industry to understand those changes, and incentivizes workers to be prepared. (More here, in an article entitled, “Lifelong Learning Is Becoming an Economic Imperative.” It also provides a great explanation of some of the worker displacement that can be expected in coming years.)

In Denmark, a country where, like the U.S., it is relatively easy for employers to hire and fire (unlike many other European countries), displaced workers are paired with a “labor consultant” who makes recommendations for retraining. The use of a consultant who can provide one-on-one support helps Danes overcome many of the hurdles that impair worker retraining programs in the U.S., where worker training programs insufficiently address the numerous barriers faced by the unemployed.

Research in the U.S. suggests that the most effective workforce development programs blend academic, vocational and life skills and highly personalized learning where the curriculum matches the individual needs of the participants. In addition, the most effective training programs either engaged directly with employers or industry sectors, or coached participants in how to find training in in-demand skills.

As the economy changes faster and faster, and we automate jobs that we used to think machines could never do, we need to help Michiganders with narrow skill sets adapt. This doesn’t mean one more certificate or a few more conversations with employers. It means individualized support and the teaching of broad skills. It means taking a good look ahead and completely redesigning workforce development for tomorrow, rather than yesterday.

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Gordon Moore is the cofounder of Intel and in the 1960s he made the incredibly prescient prediction that the amount of computing power one could buy for a dollar would double every year for the next decade. Aside from some quibbling about the exact time period of doubling, his prediction has remained largely true over the past five decades, not just one. This is known as Moore’s Law.

What repeated consistent digital doubling means, exactly, is best demonstrated through a story about an emperor and a chessboard. As legend has it, when chess was invented in sixth century India, the inventor was given an audience with the emperor. When asked to name his prize, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice to be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two to be placed on the second, four on the third, and so on, with the quantity of rice doubling every square. What most people, including the emperor, fail to realize is that if this pattern continues, by the final square the emperor would owe the inventor eighteen quintillion grains of rice, more rice than has been produced in the history of the world.

The chessboard example is a useful tool to think about the dramatic impacts of digital doubling. As the authors write, in the first half of the chessboard we can still imagine the quantities of rice: after 32 squares, the emperor owes 4 billion grains, a number we can conceptualize. It’s in the second half of the chessboard that the quantities quickly become unimaginable. And the authors argue that we’ve recently entered the second half of the chessboard.

The Second Half of the Chessboard

I was thinking about rice and the second half of the chessboard when I read the New York Times article last month The Great AI Awakening, documenting Google’s efforts to improve its Google Translate service. I highly recommend the entire article, but the summary is that things are quickly becoming unimaginable.

The old version of Google Translate relied on computer code written over a decade by hundreds of Google’s smartest engineers, which matched individual phrases in one language to another using a massive database of texts. The system was incredibly complex, but still worked off of algorithms constructed by Google engineers. And while the service was revolutionary, the phrase-by-phrase, rule-based system often produced translations that were clunky and awkward to native speakers.

Enter Google Brain. This elite team at Google created a “neural network” – essentially an effort to replicate the human mind in the digital space – that would learn the way a human does from her earliest years: through trial and error, experiencing successes and failure, identifying patterns, improving on its own. The goal was that Google Translate would no longer be relying on a set of rules written by humans, but that it would go off and learn on its own.

And it did. Over nine-months, the neural network that Google Brain created made advancements in the fluidity of translation that were off the charts, surpassing gains made by the previous system over its entire ten years of development.

This feels like the second half of the chessboard. Through advancements in technology and processing power, really smart people were able to create something in nine months that made the already amazing work of hundreds of other smart people, compiled over ten years, essentially obsolete.

The previous distinction in trying to figure out which jobs would be automated and which were safe was routine vs. complex: routine work, be it cognitive or manual, that could be broken down to a set of rules, would be automated; more complex knowledge work was safe for now.

But what we now see is that the set of rules machines can follow are now much broader, and in some cases they’re writing their own rules, identifying their own patterns, and moving into areas of work we thought were squarely in the human domain.

What does this mean for all of us?

For starters, no one can predict the future. But it seems the best way to prepare for this uncertain future is by getting as much and as broad an education as possible. “Unskilled” work, requiring only a high school degree, is rapidly being automated, and only more automation is promised. And even higher education too narrowly focused could lock one into a set of narrow skills that may soon be automated. Better, it seems, to seek a broad knowledge base, learn how to learn, and develop widely transferable skills in communication, critical thinking, and collaboration that can be applied to any job.

Things are already changing rapidly, and if we are in the second half of the chess board, things are just going to move faster. The education we all need is the one that will allow us to adjust to the changes we can’t yet imagine as we move to the next square.

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There the news is not so rosy. Why? Because increasingly manufacturing done in America is going to be largely done by robots, not humans. There isn’t anything politicians can do about that.

About the Carrier announcement Business Insider writes from the transcript of a CNBC interview of Greg Harris, CEO of Carrier parent, United Technologies:

GREG HAYES: ” …  if you think about what we talked about last week, we’re going to make a $16 million investment in that factory in Indianapolis to automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive. Now is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost of labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we’ll make the capital investments there. … But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs.”

The general theme here is something we’ve been writing about a lot at Business Insider. Yes, low-skilled jobs are being lost to other countries, but they’re also being lost to technology. Everyone from liberal, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman to Republican Sen. Ben Sasse has noted that technological developments are a bigger threat to American workers than trade. Viktor Shvets, a strategist at Macquarie, has called it the “third industrial revolution.” Hayes said in the same interview that United Technologies was focused on how to “train people for the jobs of tomorrow.” In the same breath, he seems to be suggesting the jobs it is keeping in Indiana are the jobs of yesterday. 

The second Business Insider article is about Republican U.S. Senator Ben Sasse’s take on the Carrier deal. They write:

“Morning news pretends there’s a simple political solution to the declining [number] of manufacturing jobs,” Sasse wrote. “It’s not true. We should tell the truth.” Sasse noted — as have others, such as Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist — that trying to keep jobs from going overseas is a temporary fix, given the trend toward automation in the industrial sector. Automation — even more than trade — will continue to shrink the number of manufacturing jobs. This trend is irreversible,” Sasse wrote.

Sasse added that manufacturing employment has been declining for some time and output is still on the rise, which means firms are becoming more productive and employment needs to shift elsewhere. As an example, the Republican lawmaker cited the percentage of Americans who are farmers, which has decreased from 90% of the population in 1790 to just 3% in 1980. This sort of shift will come to manufacturing, he said.

Sasse said “politicians are not good at telling the truth,” but they should be honest with Americans about the changing dynamics of the job market. Essentially, people shouldn’t expect to have the same factory job as the previous generation, and different training is needed.

Sasse, like Ohio Governor Kasich, should be commended for his courage in telling Americans what they don’t want to hear: the truth about the future of manufacturing jobs. That we can’t go back to a 20th Century economy where the core of the American middle class was lots of high paid factory jobs.

For those interested in Carrier and more details on Sasse’s view of how technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is changing the economy two videos are really worth watching. The first from the Atlantic is their take on the Carrier plant. The second is from a session Sasse did for the Foreign Policy Initiative. Go to about the 32 minute mark of the video for the portion about automation. Really impressive!

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Recent research published by the National Bureau of Economics suggests that following the Great Recession, employers got choosier about who they hired for particular occupations, looking for more specific skills and higher levels of training tied to increasing use of technology. As technology replaces jobs that can be automated, new jobs are created that involve running and analyzing the technology. Leaving the worker who is only trained for the automated task out of luck. An Atlantic City Lab article about the research explains:

For example, a sales job that used to consist of developing relationships with customers now involves using data analysis tools to target products for certain clients. A quality control manager who used to sit scanning products moving along a conveyor belt may now spend her time troubleshooting the machine that scans them for her.

This “upskilling”—which could have been a simple symptom of job scarcity, where employers took advantage of the high numbers of high-skilled but unemployed workers—hasn’t evaporated with the recovery of the job market. Instead, it has persisted, contributing to the difficulty that uneducated workers are having finding a job.

One impact of this upskilling is a further widening in the opportunity gulf between those with higher levels of education and those without. For Michigan’s unemployed, and especially our long-term unemployed, whose skills are likely depreciating or atrophying rather than increasing, this is bad news. According to a December 2015 report from Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management and Budget Bureau of Labor Market Information and Strategic Initiatives shows that Michigan’s long-term unemployed jumped from 21.2 percent to 30.0 percent (of total unemployed) between 2006 and 2015 (though the overall rate of unemployment has declined).

If Michigan is to become a high-prosperity state once again, we can’t leave these workers permanently sidelined. We also need to get ahead of this trend for adults who are low-skilled, and when setting goals for our kids and what their education must provide. For the greatest chance of economic success, once again, it’s a college degree.

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To understand what the current and coming reality is I highly recommend you take fifteen minutes and watch the You Tube video entitled “Humans need not apply “. It lays out clearly the reality that machines are increasingly going to do more and more of the work that humans are doing today.

There are no politics that can stop it from occurring. So the people that will be economically successful are those that are able to constantly adjust and learn new skills that complement rather than compete with technology. That requires building a foundation of broad skills, rather than narrow skills for a particular occupation. And the communities that are the most prosperous in the future will be those where people with those broad skills concentrate. End of story!

At the moment Michigan isn’t one of those place. Not close. Most troublesome is that we seem to be doubling down on the old declining economy and going back to education that prioritizes narrow job specific skills rather than the broader skills required for a successful forty year career. Not smart!

For those interested in exploring further how smarter and smarter machines are going to transform the economy I recommend reading:

• The Second Machine Age by MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The best book I have read on the topic.
• The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization? A scholarly article that includes projections for hundreds of occupations on how likely each is to be automated.

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The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. It still is the best book I know of to understand the big picture of what is happening to the economy. It provides the best explanation I have read on the forces that are transforming the economy and what is required to succeed in it. Read the paperback. In each edition, Friedman had the luxury of updating  the book to both reflect questions he got on his book tours and his own reflections on  a constantly changing economy.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. For how a flat world is changing jobs this is the best book I have read. Pink help us understand that globalization and technology are fundamentally changing the work that will be done in America. The big transformation is from left brain to right brain. As Pink illustrates its not just low skill work that can be automated or outsourced, but also lots of high skill, high paying, but also rule driven and routine, work. New good paying jobs increasingly will go to people who are creators, empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.

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