When machines destroy our jobs

The debate between economists on the nature of the digital revolution remains divisive. For proponents of secular stagnation, the digital age is more like a change of use with a transformation of consumption and communication patterns and the development of new concepts or ideas that renew the customer experience but without having the power to significantly increase the wealth produced by worker, the nerve of growth. For others, digital can be called a true industrial revolution with a wave of induced innovation that accelerates and whose impact in terms of growth could be spread over several decades.

Let us borrow from the economist Daniel Cohen of the Paris School of Economics a simple example to try to reconcile these two visions considered antagonistic. Suppose a simplified economy composed of two sectors. The first sector is a collection of non-digitizable service activities whose productivity is relatively low. The latter employs 100 employees for a production of 100 units. The second sector consists of higher productivity activities with a production of 200 units for an equivalent number of workers. Suppose now that this second sector is experiencing a major technological revolution that allows to completely automate the production process with a maintenance of production to 200 units without more need of manpower. In other words, the machines replace the workers who, according to our hypothesis, are redeployed in sector 1 with a doubling of production. At the end of this process, production would increase by 100 units globally, an increase of about 33%, corresponding to the growth rate of productivity gains. It seems legitimate to think that these technological changes will not produce their effects instantly with a full realization that could take almost a generation, about 30 years. If this is the case then the average annual growth rate of production in this transformation phase would hardly exceed 1%!
This example, obviously reductive, shows that it is possible to coexist over a long period technological revolution and "quasi" economic stagnation, depending on the degree of complementarity between innovative capital and work.

During the two previous industrial revolutions, machines facilitating the division of tasks and the multiplication of human operations were complements and not substitutes for work. This organizational model reached a climax with Taylorism (then Fordism) and the appearance of assembly lines and line work, made of routine and monotonous tasks, which allowed a standardized mass production and raised productivity levels. At the same time, the intensification of information exchanges and the increase in the volume of written and encrypted data have led to a rapid development of office jobs (shorthand typists, telephone operators, clerks, etc.), a development supported by the invention of the typewriter (circa 1860) and the gradual insertion of women into working life.

And while machines have gradually replaced humans in terms of physical and repetitive tasks, the progress and modernization of society has allowed the emergence of new, less arduous and more rewarding professions. Schematically, the decline in employment in the industrial sector has been accompanied by sufficient productivity gains to allow price reductions and reorient the purchasing power of households towards a demand for services, driving the development of the tertiary sector and its new deposits jobs.

Today, the digital revolution widens the scope of the possibilities of computerization and automation of the tasks that are manual and repetitive but also "intellectual", routine or not. Machines threaten new categories of jobs ranging from truck drivers (with the driverless smart car), to cashiers and sellers (with the development of e-commerce and the digitization of outlets) through all occupations of which the core business is data analysis such as translators, accountants, financial analysts or lawyers.

The risk is therefore to witness a disconnect between productivity and employment, between wealth creation and work. This threat of gradual disappearance of intermediate jobs subject to digitization would go hand in hand with a strong polarization of the labor market between highly skilled jobs requiring non-digitizable skills (mastery of technological news, creativity or relational and social intelligence) and on the other, the multiplication of "small jobs" of local services, with flexible and low-paid hours, means "uberisation" of jobs.

Faced with this distressing vision of mass technological unemployment and the downgrading of the middle classes, which are the source of immense confusion and a difficult rise in social inequalities, futurists offer a romantic vision of the future with the advent of a society of plenty, freed from productivism and wage labor, a greener society where we would live better and longer, with modes of organization of economic life articulated around the exchange and sharing: a a kind of sweet utopia where saving technologies could solve all our problems ...