From slavery to technology – a brief history of jobs.

By Neil Patrick

How can anyone expect to sell their labor in a future world where machines will do all the work?

Human civilization goes back more than 10,000 years, to when the first Neolithic peoples emerged. Early humans had four over-riding needs to survive: food, shelter, clothing and materials to make tools and weapons. No-one had told them about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs of course. So they didn’t know what they were missing. Consequently, self-actualization wasn’t too much of a priority for early man.

Money also didn’t exist in pre-history. The level and range of consumption was so low that simple bartering sufficed for millennia. Today, it’s hard to even imagine a society that isn’t based on money. And whilst many of us wish we had more money, we don’t really think very much about what money actually is. Let alone about the monetary and central banking systems that prevail in the world today. Instead, we mostly think of money as a handy way of facilitating the exchange of goods and services by means of a convenient and universally acceptable token.

While early man worked digging, planting, hunting, foraging and building mainly to satisfy his own needs directly, today, we exchange our work for money from satisfying the needs of others on a daily basis. We go to work, and that work is usually a job.

A job, any job, is labor. Whether you sweep streets or perform brain surgery, you are engaged in labor. And every job trades money for labor. In general terms, the scarcer your labor is relative to the demand for it in the market, the more highly paid you will be.

But slavery not paid work was the basis for the world’s most successful civilizations.

The more work a society can extract from its population, the more successful and powerful it becomes. So, the powerful members of society in all civilisations were quick to spot the opportunity that was available if you could get labor for free. The means to obtain this was the exertion of force. Slavery was created. We think of this as an ancient and barbaric practice. But the world’s greatest empires and nation states from ancient Greece to Rome and Egypt all leveraged free labor to build their power.

Not many workers were actually paid for building this.

Slavery was so successful that it proved remarkably persistent through the centuries, including in the US and Europe. The thirteenth amendment to the US Consitution, abolishing slavery, was passed by the Senate in April 1864, and by the House of Representatives in January 1865. The amendment did not take effect until it was ratified by three fourths of the states, which occurred on December 6, 1865, just about 150 years ago, which is yesterday in terms of human history on earth.

But that was far from the end of it. More recently, slave labor was the chosen means to sustaining the power of the Third Reich and effectively prolonged WW2 in Europe. Not to mention directly bringing about the premature demise of millions of innocents who were quite literally worked to death. But looked at from a purely economic perspective, slavery is a very effective method for a group of people to acquire by force greater wealth and power than they would be able to do by legitimate means.

But slavery hasn’t really ended.

Today slavery is far from over. Its most loathsome variant has been given a rebranding for a start; human trafficking. There are many different estimates of how large the human trafficking and sex trafficking industries are. Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People (2004), estimates that almost 27 million people are in "modern-day slavery" across the globe.

Only a little less exploitative is the debt-slave or indentured servant. Largely made illegal almost everywhere, this practice remains widespread in many parts of the world today. In order to pay off debts (often incurred through nefarious means in the first place), a person becomes a virtual slave, working to pay off debts that never actually reduce enough to free them.

A less repellent form of indentured servitude is the apprenticeship, where an individual trades their labor in return for training. Whilst an internee may not think of themselves as a slave, they are still willingly participating in a form of indentured servitude. This is why internships are on the rise. They are no more and no less than a white collar version of indentured servitude.

And even the academic world exploits free labor. Here, indenture takes the form of the scholarship system used by most universities. Nearly all Ph.D. programs use graduate students as a supply of virtually free labor, assisting staff and professors to carry out their work on research projects.

Now even slaves are about to be put out of work.

Quite apart from the abhorrent human suffering created by slavery, it has profound economic consequences on the rest of the population. Slave or low paid labor lessens the demand for paid labour. Which in turn makes the rest of society poorer, with the critical exception of those who are able to derive benefit from leveraging slaves or low paid workers.

And right now there’s a whole new generation of slaves. Except they are not human. They are better and even cheaper than human slaves. They are machines. They are micro-chips. And they are multiplying faster than a virus.

And this is the problem with technology. We love the way it enables us to do tasks faster, cheaper, better than ever before. At home and at work. But technology is both a glorious gift and our potential nemesis. Just like slavery, technology is consuming the opportunities available for people to exchange their labor for money. And technology is destroying jobs at an unprecedented and accelerating pace.

Plenty believe that this is just scare-mongering. That there is absolutely no historical precedent when technological progress has resulted in anything other than increased wealth and prosperity. That much is true. But today isn’t yesterday. And here’s why. We cannot separate technology from two other factors which combine to make today different from any time before; finite natural resources and a monetary system based on ever-compounding debt.

Planes, trains and automobiles.

Whilst some will profit from the creation of new types of work created by the tech age, many more will be condemned to a life of exclusion and poverty. And it's not just low paid manual workers. High skill jobs are under threat too. Even with their lengthy training, professionalism and high status, pilots’ days as the rockstars of the world of transportation are numbered.

How long before an aircraft cockpit no longer needs windows?

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now flying all over the world every day. Not just as surveillance platforms and weapons carriers for the military. They are doing photography, crop spraying and rescue work. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos announced in December 2013 that Amazon is planning delivery of some of its parcels using UAVs. This was met with skepticism, with perceived obstacles including federal and state regulatory approval, public safety, reliability, individual privacy, operator training and certification, security (hacking), payload thievery, and logistical challenges. But just 7 months later, in July 2014, it was revealed that Amazon was working on its 8th and 9th drone prototypes, that could fly at 50 miles per hour and carry 5-pound packages.

It can only be a matter of time before unmanned aircraft are carrying passengers and much bigger payloads. How many pilots will become unemployed as more and more aircraft become pilotless?

Calling an argument “Luddite” doesn’t refute it.

The fear that technological progress threatens jobs is nothing new. In 19th century England, the Luddites, a group of textile workers carried out violent protests against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817. The spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work. The artisan Luddites burned mills and smashed looms. Many were subsequently arrested by the government and either executed or transported to penal colonies.

How many people working as drivers today will have little or no work 10 years from now? Right now, every day, Google has driverless cars trundling round the streets of California 24/7. Interestingly, in August 2011, a Google driverless car was involved in a crash near Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. The neo-Luddite’s celebrations at this news were short-lived, when Google reported that the car was being driven by a human being at the time of the accident.

Economists apply the term “Luddite fallacy” to the notion that technological unemployment leads to structural unemployment and is consequently economically calamitous. Their argument is essentially that if a technological innovation results in a reduction of necessary labour inputs for a given activity, then the industry-wide cost of production falls. This in turn lowers the price of the goods or service and increases the supply. The combination of greater supply and lower prices pushes consumption higher. Theoretically, this higher production volume requires an increase in aggregate labour inputs and this extra labour requirement offsets the unemployment caused by the original technical innovation.

But this is where the economists have got it wrong. They are looking at the question from too narrow a perspective. Implicit in their theoretical viewpoint is that our capacity and appetite to consume is limitless. That consumption is potentially infinite and only price dictates how much we will consume. The Luddites existed at a time when scarcity was still a prevalent state of affairs. Today, scarcity of goods has become scarce. It's only the world's non-renewable natural resources which are getting scarcer.

Machine derived work has replaced scarcity with over abundance.

Today, technology means we can produce way more than we can consume. Technology has almost eliminated scarcity in the developed world. Prior to 1800, the world was a low energy society. And the primary unit of work was a human being. A working human can produce about 0.1 horsepower. During this time, around 98% of all work done was the result of human labor. The remainder was animal power and basic technologies like the waterwheel. Machines existed, but they didn’t replace humans, they merely assisted human tasks.

So throughout all of mankind’s history, until around 1800, 98% of all work done was done by humans. This ratio was a fixed constant and meant that while 2% of humans enjoyed wealth and comfort, 98% endured a struggle just to survive. For millennia, there was no absolutely change in the energy available to produce things and so scarcity prevailed everywhere.

In 1781, James Watt created the first steam engine. Since that time there has been continuous technological progress and machines have become more and more efficient at converting energy into work. These developments have spread throughout the world and the United States was the clearest leader.

James Watt's and Henry Boulton's steam engine, 1784
By Robert Henry Thurston , via Wikimedia Commons

Between 1800 and 1900, the use of human labour steadily reduced, as the proportion of non-human energy moved ever upwards. The continuation of these two trends predicted that eventually machines would be doing more work than humans. And this is exactly what happened. We can more or less pinpoint when it happened - 1911. At this point, the proportion of machine-derived work overtook human work for the first time. And its growth has continued exponentially ever since.

As of 1992, the USA had over 35.3 billion horsepower of work energy available from non-human sources. This was a gain of over 4000% in just 192 years, and represents 89,000 kg-cal of mechanically derived work energy per person in the US. Before 1800, this figure had been constant for all time at just 2,000 kg-cal per person – a growth of over 44 times! This made the USA the first country in history able to produce more than it could consume and was the foundation of the US becoming a global superpower in the 20th century.

Today it is no co-incidence that the US is struggling to recover from the reverberations of the 2008 financial collapse. But the financial collapse wasn’t the cause of the recession, it was a symptom of it. A symptom of a society in which the creation of abundance by technology has overtaken the abilities of people to earn money by selling their labor to a market where scarcity was disappearing.

This isn’t a prophecy of doom or neo-Luddite manifesto however. It is merely a description of why we all need to grasp a new economic paradigm if we are to survive and prosper in the 21st century. It’s not the end, rather it’s the beginning of a new economic era. We are on the cusp of a transformation of society which voids many of the ideas that underpinned all our thinking about how we earn the money to lead our lives.

I'm not the only person that thinks this. This TEDx talk by economist Andrew McAfee argues that that, yes, machines will take our jobs. The kind of jobs we know now. And here he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and who will become the 21st century's have's and have-nots.