Rowing is the hardest sport I’ve ever done.
Besides the ungodly hours, it demands a constant balance of strength and precision. Eight pairs of hands lift their oars, glide inches above the water, and drop their blades to pull the shell forward. This cadence needs to happen consistently, and in unison. Precision. Strength. Precision. Strength. If a pair of hands are too low, the boat rocks and loses speed. Too high, the oar catches water, and everything stops: it’s sudden, loud, and someone always gets hurt.
It’s not lost on me that I’m using a fairly exclusive sport to describe what’s coming for all of us. But like a rowing shell, the future of work has the stability of a potato chip, and technology out of balance with labour markets will stop us dead in the water.
Abundant labor force emerges
Here’s the punchline: we’re moving away from being a scarce labour force to an abundant one, and this threatens our stability.
In 2006, author Thomas Friedman wrote The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. He predicted a looming clear stage where limits of geography and labour were becoming less relevant.
As an employee, your geography partly dictates your value, since local businesses hire local workers. To an employer, this locks their business to a place, and local workers are priced accordingly. Geography is a friction that puts scarcity in the system. Scarcity keeps you safe.
In 2007, Tim Ferris wrote that ‘lifestyle design’ was available to anyone who outsourced repetitive tasks to focus on those with higher value. Using a crowd-sourced title, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich described the ease of hiring people to sort your email and manage your calendar. Outsourcing had been mostly offered by BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and virtual assistants were paid a competitive wage.
Then Steve Jobs launched The Device.
Mix two parts global labour trend with one part iPhone, and outsourcing turned local: the gig economy was born. If there was an app for that, there was an abundance of workers all vying for the same job. Uber, Lift, TaskRabbit. Technology removed the scarcity. Subsequently, according to Statista, the gig economy is growing three times faster than the US workforce, with an expected size of 86 million people by 2027.
Disruption from AI and machine learning
Today, reading this article, you may be wondering if it was written using AI.
(It was not.)
If globalization and outsourcing drove the ball downfield, machine learning and artificial intelligence will spike the ball in the end zone (the football analogy is better). According to The Economist, some predict 47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of becoming automated, while others say that number is closer to 9%. Both hunches mark when the dust settles; between now and then, the disruption of stability from artificial intellegence will rival that of climate change.
In 2019, Vice News produced a Special Report called The Future of Work. It starts with a man in the drivers seat operating an autonomous 18-wheeler as it navigates complex traffic. The steering wheel spins in front of him, while he checks the side mirrors.
“I have not touched the wheel at all.”
Trucking employs 1.8 million people in the US, and has been tagged as the first job to be replaced with machine learning.
What do you think the last job to be replaced will be?
(Hint: it was made into a tv show.)