The Future We Should Have By Now
On the promise of technology, and why it hasn’t shortened our workweek yet
Okay, so we’re still waiting on flying cars and transporter beams and matter replicators, but to be fair, the technology we have is pretty remarkable. From the computing power in our smartphones, to solar power, to robots and learning algorithms — the future is coming along pretty well. Our daily lives today are packed with things that were all but unimaginable twenty, or even just ten, years ago. For all the technologies that haven’t materialized, there are others that would blow the minds of the sci-fi writers of past generations.
And while some of those imagined technologies may seem a little fanciful through a modern lens — like replicated-to-order food or a domestic robot servant — they are, in spirit, very much aligned with technologies that have come to be, in that they are technologies designed to do things for us to make our lives easier.
From washing machines, to cars, to the internet — the best advances in technology are the ones that take work off our hands and make our tasks more efficient. And on that front we have made incredible advances.
We can see it in the proliferation of machines in our own houses (coffee machines and stand mixers, not to mention dishwashers), and we can see it in just how many things we can get done on a computer or a phone. How many tasks can you check off in a few minutes on the internet that would once have taken a trip to a bank or a post office? And we can see it in the workplace. Offices can organize and communicate at the speed of data transmission. Designs can be made, revised, and tested in software that streamlines and assists in the process. Assembly lines are now the domain of robots and machinery. We’ve never been so efficient. Not by a lot. Technology is and was a revolution in industry and the work that keeps our society going, reducing and reducing again the need for human labor to produce what was once entirely produced by human labor.
“Automation” is an interesting word, because is has the distinction of being exactly the right word to use while also carrying a weight of negativity and foreboding that it didn’t come by on its own.
Why is it that we talk about automation taking our jobs from us and not automation doing our work for us? It’s an interesting and specific phrasing that manages to imply as much as it actually says.
The simple answer — and boy howdy is there a lot of history packed into this simple answer — is that, at some point, we stopped measuring our work by what needed done and started measuring it in hours.
Whereas once our work would have been defined as “sow the fields” or “milk the cows,” now it’s defined as “work eight hours.” These days we have farm equipment that can sow a field in a fraction of the time, but because we define a job as an eight hour day, it doesn’t mean that we’re done with our work in a fraction of the time. Instead it means that a person can sow a lot more fields in a workday.
That’s very good news if you own a farm. Think how much you can produce! It’s less good news if you’re a farm worker, now getting paid exactly the same hourly rate for ten times the productivity.
This right here is the crux of why technology hasn’t brought us the future we should have by now. For those of us who don’t own the farm (or the store, or the bank, or the corporation) getting more done with technology doesn’t reduce our work load. It just frees up time for our bosses to give us more work. And the extra work translates directly into profit for the owners. They get more productivity in less time, while paying less staff.
When you break it down, the problem is pretty simple. A job defined by a set number of hours can’t automatically deliver us the promise of technology. Without intervention, it won’t make our jobs easier, it will only change our output. The gradual, miraculous advance of technology is almost invisible to us, because no matter how much easier our tasks become, we can never reach the end of them — we can only reach the end of our 40 hours this week, to start again next week, with as much work as it takes to fill that time.
Which is why we need to make the change deliberately. Technology has delivered. Machines and algorithms have facilitated a meteoric and well-documented rise in productivity. Automation has been “taking jobs” for decades now, and it’s high time we started treating that as the good thing it ought to be.
Personally, I think every job “lost” to automation should be celebrated with a party and an early retirement, but transitional unemployment benefits and new vocational training is good too. The catch is, it’s only good if there are jobs to transition to; work still to be done.
Automation is an ominous word because, as things stand, automated jobs translate to unemployed people. More people fighting for fewer jobs translates to lower wages, which leads to some people needing to work more than one job, which means even fewer jobs to go around. All of this, because we haven’t made adjustments for how much of our work we no longer need to do in a technologically advanced, and advancing, society.
Instead of fearing the loss of jobs, we need to acknowledge that if we want everyone to do a share of the work, it’s time to divide the work into smaller shares. The 40 hour work week is a relic of another time. 32 hours could work. It might still be too much, but it’s a good place to start.
Defining jobs by hours instead of tasks means the gradual reduction in our labor isn’t going to happen automatically, but it does still need to happen.
The promise of technology should be for everyone, and the four day work week is a future we should have by now.
