On being replaced by technology
By way of celebrating fifty years of IEEE Spectrum, the June 2014 issue investigates some technological trends that it hopes will bring us "the future we deserve". Tekla S. Perry (pp. 40-45) describes a part of this future in which computer-generated humans become indistinguishable from actors captured on film. Explaining why we need to create fake humans when we already have seven thousand million real ones — and plenty of them out-of-work actors to boot — takes some doing. Perry makes some interesting points in this direction, but I nonetheless winced on behalf of all of those already-underemployed actors who might be wondering if Tesla's future leaves them with anything to do.
Fears that we'll all be put out of work by automation go back a long way. Contemptuous dismissals of such fears, and attendant references to Luddism, probably go back nearly as far. The really interesting thing about replacing the work of actors (if it were to happen) is that we'd be replacing something that people actually enjoy doing, not just some tedious chore that they do for the money. As much as an anti-Luddite might assure me, for example, that the growing economy will find me a new job if university teaching were to be replaced by technology, would I find the new job as inspiring as the old one?
One solution for those who enjoy now-automated tasks is to simply continue to do them as a hobby, just as I and other mediaevalists hand-make costumes, beer, embroidery, and other things even though machines can make the same with much less effort. But that does seem to doom us to spending the best eight hours of every day in uninspiring work done just for the money, fitting our passions into our spare time.
By coincidence, The Drum had Alan Kohler take on automation and unemployment in the same week that I read Spectrum. According to Kohler, "automation is suppressing employment, wages and inflation and will do so for a decade or more to come", giving headaches to central bankers attempting to set policies that increase employment while controlling inflation. This is all great for the owners of said machinery, though, who can obtain all of the revenue from their output without having to pay any workers.
Kohler's argument is too sketchy, and my knowledge of economics too weak, for me to say much about his claim. But the potential for automation to create inequality is also a recurring theme in Spectrum's examination of the possible downsides of its futures: those who control technology can use that power to create even more technology and gain even more power, while the rest languish in technological powerlessness.
The threat in Kohler's and Spectrum's dystopias isn't that automation will one day throw masses of people out of work, as the archetypal Luddites might have feared. It's that automation will slowly transfer dignity and power from the broad mass of people to an elite few who control the system. I doubt that many people miss the drudgery faced by mediaeval peasants, who have now been largely replaced by machinery in developed nations. But will we be so glad to give up the passion, autonomy and self-respect that inspires artistic and professional lifestyles?
Winning the lottery and other certainties
Every now and again, someone who knows that I'm a software developer, but is not a software developer him- or herself, tells me about how much money certain software developers make by developing mobile applications (or, in one recent case, web sites). Knowing quite a few software developers (including myself) who are somewhat less wealthy than the heroes of these stories, I've come to suspect that telling the stories is akin to telling an out-of-work actor that Tom Cruise makes millions of dollars starring in Hollywood blockbusters. Sure, a select few people do make millions of dollars by hitting upon the right software or being picked up for the right films, but most of us surely have much more modest prospects — just ask your average actor.
The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a happy, but measured, story along these lines in its "My Career" section (Dotty over phone apps, 29-30 March 2014, p. 13). It's not completely clear to me what the hero of the article is actually employed to do, but the thrust of the article is that he has successfully converted an interest in computing into a career by finding work with an iPhone app developer. In that sense, he doesn't seem much different from me or a lot of other computer scientists: we started out with an interest in computing, got degrees in it, and ended up working with computers in one capacity or another. I imagine similar things happen for people with interests in other things, at least some of the time.
To its credit, the SMH story doesn't make it out to be quite so easy as my non-developer colleagues sometimes seem to think it is, and nor is its hero made out to be particularly wealthy. Nonetheless, My Career and similar publications only interview winners: people reading the employment pages of the newspaper aren't likely to be seduced by the lives of sessional academics, out-of-work actors and other frustrated folks.
I suppose a gung-ho business type might say that I lack the entrepreneurial spirit required to create an opportunity that would make me rich. Perhaps I do: I'm typically risk-averse and I didn't take up engineering because I was interested in running businesses (or, for that matter, because I expected to be wealthy). But I think such gung-ho-ness might also be glossing over the part of the definition of entrepreneur that involves being the one who bears the risk of an enterprise. Cherry-picking the fates of successful entrepreneurs, who accepted the risk and won, ignores the fate of the many entrepreneurs who accepted the risk and lost. The result is the dubious supposition that entrepreneurial behaviour is a sure path to wealth.
Coincidentally, the April 2014 issue of IEEE Spectrum contained an insert full of advice to job-seeking graduates that nicely illustrates this sort of cherry-picking, apparently unconsciously: three short articles outlining all the wonderful job opportunities that exist throughout the world are followed by a long article (How to Stand Out in Your Job Search) describing how graduates can stand out from the hundreds of other graduates also seeking such opportunities. Sure, someone out of those hundreds is going to end up with the job, and you have to be in it to win it, but surely no level-headed assessment of such competition could conclude that everyone, or even many people, are destined to win.
The joy of engineering and the banality of products
I recently happened upon an article from Today's Engineer in which Doug Lamm contrasts the views espoused in Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy (1976) and those espoused in Samuel C. Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976). Scitovsky worries that populating our world (or, at least, the United States) with labour-saving and comfort-providing devices might leave devices' users with no challenges to meet, leading to boredom. Florman writes of the pleasures that engineers experience in the act of engineering, which provides exactly the challenges that Scitovsky worries we might engineer out of life.
Scitovsky and Florman's views are not mutually exclusive: engineers may very well have a wonderful time developing products that leave their users bored and lazy. This prospect might seem fairly depressing for a profession that takes pride in its ability to produce artefacts that improve people's lives.
Of course another way of looking at it is that the pleasure experienced in doing engineering is as valid and good a pleasure as any, so what further justification do engineers need? I don't feel any need to justify a Sunday hike, say, with any benefit to society beyond my own pleasure, so what other motivation should I need to write software? Is whatever pleasure I might experience in developing software diminished if the end result isn't particularly useful to anyone?
Yet I have to write software that pleases users if I expect the users to pay me for it. Perhaps the knowledge that I need to earn money from software development prevents me from taking quite so care-free an attitude to software as I do to hiking. Things might be different if I could afford to undertake software development purely as a hobby. Yet, even then, having adoring users surely increases an engineer's pride in his or her work, even if the users don't pay a cent for the product.
Engineers are perhaps fortunate that there is so much demand for what they do: engineers can make a living by performing work that they find challenging and satisfying. If the world appetite for roads, machines and computers ever diminishes, engineers might find themselves in a position similar to those of present-day artists who want to devote their lives to their art, but must make ends meet by doing odd jobs in which they can't make use of their skills.
Lamm concludes that technological innovation is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad, and that it is "the development of wisdom regarding the satisfying use of technology" that matters. He alludes to the example of rock-climbing: there may well be easier ways of getting up mountains than climbing the rock, but people nonetheless buy rock-climbing equipment because they enjoy the challenge of doing it this way. For the engineer and his or her sponsors, the trick is to realise when to build rock-climbing equipment, and when to build an elevator.
What's a STEM crisis?
I've recently been reading a bit about a possible "STEM crisis", or lack of one, mostly in IEEE Spectrum, but also on The Conversation. "STEM" is an acronym for "Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics", and the crisis, if it exists, is supposed to be caused by a shortage of graduates in STEM disciplines.
The disputants seem to me to be asking two somewhat different questions. STEM enthusiasts like professional societies and chief scientists start with the assumption that STEM is a good thing that we should be doing more of, and argue that we should therefore have more STEM graduates to do it. Economists and out-of-work STEM graduates start with the observation that there are already numerous un- and under-employed STEM graduates, and argue that we should therefore have less of them.
These two views are perfectly consistent if one accepts that we, as a society, ought to be doing more STEM. If so, the enthusiasts are really saying that there is a crisis in the amount of STEM being undertaken. STEM graduates experience this crisis as an inability to find work.
How much STEM should we be doing? In the Conversation article cited above, Andrew Norton assumes that we should be doing exactly that STEM for which buyers are willing to pay (manifested in Norton's article by how many STEM graduates employers are willing to hire). Taken at face value, this is more or less the answer one gets from basic free market economics: if doing some STEM gets the greatest value out of all the ways buyers could use the resources involved, the buyers will pay for that STEM. If doing something else with those resources gives the buyers a greater benefit, the buyers will do something else.
I think that most people, however, would agree that a significant proportion of STEM has the character of what economists call a "public good". Public goods are items like defence forces and street lighting for which is difficult or impossible to charge people according to their individual use. Markets may under-invest in public goods since would-be investors can't extract payment for them even though buyers exist who would actually use them.
Norton implicitly assumes that the government has estimated the value of public STEM and invested a suitable amount of tax money into it, creating a matching demand for STEM graduates in government-funded programmes. I suspect that the enthusiasts, however, place more or less infinite value on STEM. For them, there will always be a "STEM crisis" because no amount of government or industry investment can ever realise such a value.
Dream jobs and nightmares at home
Today I read two articles expressing more or less opposite views (or at least hopes) of employment in engineering. On one hand, IEEE Spectrum presented its annual round-up of dream jobs, beginning with a lament that "unflattering stereotypes persist, and they're tired [and] out of touch with reality". The Register, on the other hand, reports the views of one Mike Laverick that you need a home lab to keep your job — that is, you need to be exactly the kind of technology-bound stereotype that Spectrum wishes to take on.
Spectrum is, of course, cherry-picking a very small number of individuals who have what it describes as "dream jobs" involving travelling around the world, working on exotic projects and/or making noble contributions to humankind. The Register might be more representative of the common mass of engineers working on (presumably) worthwhile but unglamourous projects for mundane employers in their home town. The commenters on The Register's article certainly sound a lot more like the lab-at-home folks than the high-flying Rennaissance men and women featured in Spectrum.
I don't have a lab at home, and, indeed, resent the notion that I ought to spend my spare time training up for a job in which I have high formal qualifications, years of experience and continue to work in day-in day-out. Laverick's attitude seems to me to pander to what I think are wrong-headed views of programming that prioritise familiarity with the latest buzzword over the fundamental engineering skills possessed by truly competent programmers. Yet buzzwords are doomed to come and go, and, I, at least, feel I have better things to do than pursue them in a lab at home. What other trade or profession demands that its members practice their craft not just in their professional lives, but in their spare time also? (One even hesitates to imagine the goings-on in the home labs of, say, surgeons and nuclear engineers.)
So I'm probably more typical of the readership of Spectrum than of The Register. Indeed, it isn't immediately obvious that Spectrum's dream workers have a better lot than I do (though I suspect they earn more money). Simon Hauger appears to do more or less the same kind of work that I and numerous teachers do, while Marcia Lee appears to does more or less the same kind of work that I and numerous other software developers do, albeit for a better-known company than most of us (the Khan Academy).
Perhaps the most important aspect about Spectrum's dream jobs is that they show some vision for engineering beyond engineering itself. While Laverick and his followers are beavering away in their home labs in pursuit of yet more engineering cred (or at least buzzwords), Hauger, Lee and the rest are thinking about how science and engineering serve education, art, adventure and human development. This might sound like a utopian dream, but, if engineering isn't serving something like this, why are we doing it?
