AI is destroying jobs (including my old one). And a solution nobody will discuss…

I was a tech writer of software manuals – click here, click there, click next, click okay… There were times when I worked on really interesting projects, but for the most part, that was the job. And it’s exactly the sort of job that will soon be done by an AI, for the most part. My motto now is:

“Any job where you have no autonomy, will be automated.”

That is, if there is no creativity required in a role (or if creativity is actually a negative), if no decision making or analysis is involved, that job is ripe for automation. 

Within two years, I predict that there will be software that will crawl a user interface, clicking every drop down sequence, take screen shots (using preloaded dummy data to fill in fields), and write numbered steps for every permutation. The role for the tech writer will be to set a filter to only grab relevant commands and actions, and to add any warning or callout info. Presto, a user manual, in hours not weeks.

That’s it. And there goes a huge chunk of the tech writing jobs in the world.

And it’s not just McDonalds servers or call center workers or (with the rise of self-driving vehicles) truck and other delivery drivers.

Already, hundreds of financial analysts are being eliminated on Wall Street. Kensho is an automated data scraper that does the job in seconds that financial analysts used to toil over late into the night. Its founder says that:

Within a decade, he said, between a third and a half of the current employees in finance will lose their jobs to Kensho and other automation software. It began with the lower-paid clerks, many of whom became unnecessary when stock tickers and trading tickets went electronic. It has moved on to research and analysis, as software like Kensho has become capable of parsing enormous data sets far more quickly and reliably than humans ever could. The next ‘‘tranche,’’ as Nadler puts it, will come from the employees who deal with clients: Soon, sophisticated interfaces will mean that clients no longer feel they need or even want to work through a human being.

And so we’re looking at a future with an ever-diminishing number of jobs. And what are the solutions offered to this impending crisis?

Well, there’s a plan for a Universal Basic Income, for one: 

Rather than a job-killing catastrophe, tech supporters of U.B.I. consider machine intelligence to be something like a natural bounty for society: The country has struck oil, and now it can hand out checks to each of its citizens.

These supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering.

There are propositions about retraining workers whose jobs have been eliminated, forever.

But nobody addresses the elephant in the room:

We need Negative Population Growth.

The math is easy: Fewer jobs + higher population = more rootless young people attracted to visions of the world where technology is rolled back to the Dark Ages, when “things were simpler.” (And better for men, and racial majorities.) 

In the past, people had more children because the likelihood of some of them dying was extremely high, so they had more children because their hands were needed to work the family farm or business. They had more children because religious institutions demanded that each sex act result in another child, whether the parents could feed and shelter it or not. They had more children because masculine fertility was celebrated in the culture. 

When we have less work for people to do, we need less people. The coming automation of so many jobs is a golden opportunity for the world to start addressing its core problem – overpopulation. Global warming? Too many cars, too much industry. Rootless, jobless young people attracted to violent religions and causes? College graduates moving back to their parents’ house because demand for housing has outstripped supply?

My question is simple. Why do the great minds thinking about the human impact of increased automation never mention this? 

Because it’s a highly charged and taboo subject. Think about the forced sterilizations that went on in India in the 1970s, and how India’s sterilization program today targets the poor and underprivileged. Genocide, racism, classism, all play into our fear of even discussing it. China’s one child policy resulted in higher rates of female infanticide, because boys had higher earning potential and because siring sons is more culturally admirable in many cultures.

But…on the other hand we have, especially in the US, what I call “Celebrating Overpopulating.” Shows like 19 Kids and Counting, or the flood of gifts given to Octomoms and the like, rewards people for increasing the population by unsustainable levels. 

We are more likely to face chaos and disorder if we don’t address this simple fact – fewer jobs means the world will need fewer humans. 

How to do this? I don’t know. But it’s time for those who weigh in on the impact of automation to start at least addressing overpopulation itself as a crisis that automation will only exacerbate.