The inconceivable truth: our jobs are not coming back

OVER the next decade nearly half of Australia’s jobs will disappear. Many of these are skilled jobs and they’re not coming back.

MILLIONS of jobs are about to disappear, and we have no idea how to replace them.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said last week that there will be winners and losers from the economic reform necessary to keep Australia competitive.

What he didn’t say, what everyone talking about the unrest of the working and middle classes sweeping Trump, Brexit and One Nation into the political forefront aren’t saying, is all the jobs that once kept people in safe employment are gone. And not only are they not coming back, millions more are going to go in the next few years.

The latest report from CEDA states that “40 per cent of Australian jobs that exist today, have a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing in the next 10 to 15 years”. And it’s not only unskilled jobs we’re losing.

A MICRO EXAMPLE OF A MACRO PROBLEM

Two of my friends just quit their nice, stable jobs and bought a bar. Neither of them have ever worked in a bar before and, on the surface, this seems like a mad thing for safely employed professionals to do.

Or it would, if there was any such thing as safe employment.

They’re not buying a cash register for the bar, they’re buying a point of sale system. It tracks every drink sold, tells them which ones are the most profitable and at what time of day they sell best. It can order in new stock when they’re running low, prepare their BAS every quarter, and spit out everything they need to do their tax return.

So, they don’t need a bookkeeper, they could probably get by without an accountant, and taking all that admin time out of their day means they can cut down on bar staff.

It’s just one tiny bar, and they’ve dropped three or four jobs with a simple iPad app.

While customer service will always be appreciated, there are a lot of vulnerable jobs in hospitality.

THE JOBS THAT WILL BE NO LONGER

Uber is investing in driverless technology and Amazon is already experimenting with drone delivery. Within a very short time, the thousands of Australians employed to drive taxis, delivery vans, trucks and trains, will become redundant.

Foxcon, tech suppliers to Apple and Samsung, replaced 60,000 workers with robots earlier this year, and that’s just in one factory.

Two years ago, an American company produced a machine that can make 360 hamburgers an hour, finely modified to each customer’s requirements. The fast food industry employs more than 150,000 people in Australia, and we don’t need them anymore.

And it’s not just what we used to think of as unskilled work being supplanted by robots.

A hospital in California has replaced all their pharmacists with machines, which work faster and more accurately than humans.

IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, famous for beating a human Jeopardy champion, is now a doctor. It doesn’t get tired, forget things, or mistakes because of bias or over confidence. It doesn’t need to spend years learning, and it doesn’t have to specialise in only one medical field. It’s cheap to replicate, and it can operate anywhere in the world.

Doctors at the University of Texas are already using IBM’s cognitive system, Watson, to improve patient outcomes. Picture: Feature Photo Service

Thousands of lawyers, accountants, paralegals and mortgage officers, once the heartland of the comfortable middle class, have lost their jobs to robots that work more efficiently and far more cheaply.

Even journalists are not immune. Associated Press has robots writing sports reports and finance updates for mainstream press right now. And most of us probably couldn’t tell the article we’re reading was written by a computer.

CAPITALISM IS STARTING TO DEFEAT ITSELF

We could argue that people don’t want all their daily interactions with people replaced by robots, and this is true to some extent. It’s what’s future proofing my friends at the bar, people in a tight-knit community want to walk into their local and be greeted by someone who knows their name, what they drink, and can give them a friendly ribbing about their football team’s loss.

They don’t go there to press a button and be served by a computer.

But human beings are enormously adaptable. The first iPhone was released less than 10 years ago, it’s now so ubiquitous that we panic when we leave the house without more computing power in our back pocket than was used to send Neil Armstrong to the moon.

The point of capitalism is to be innovative with ideas, and to increase the profitability of selling those ideas.

Human labour is expensive, inefficient and prone to error. Replacing humans with automated processes makes perfect sense in a capitalism model, but we’ve reached the tipping point now, and capitalism is starting to defeat itself.

The problem is not convincing people to accept robots doing jobs once done by humans, we’ve already done that. When the ATM is broken and we have to go deal with a human bank teller, it’s not getting better service, it’s annoying and inconvenient.

The problem is how we move money around the economy if we no longer need to give it to people in exchange for time and skill.

To put it another way, if you replace all the human jobs with robots, how do humans obtain money to pay for the things robots make and do?

The reason politicians and corporate leaders are not talking about this question is that no one has an answer yet.

The theory of a basic income, where corporations that own the robots give money to governments to distribute to the populace so they can pay for goods and services, has been touted about for a while.

And while it’s a nice idea (elegantly explored in Tim Dunlop’s book, Why the Future is Workless) it would require a radical change in how we understand our lives, our work and our economies.

But someone is going to have to come up with something soon, because the pace of change is only increasing, and ignoring a problem never makes it go away. Millions of people who never expected to be poor are about to lose their jobs, and they are demanding to know how they are going to continue to live the lifestyle they’ve been taught is normal when having a stable job is no longer normal, or even possible.

For now, the only solution I can come up with is to head down to my local, have a glass of wine, and chat to my bartender about the imminent end of the world.

Jane Gilmore is a freelance writer from Melbourne. Follow her on Twitter @JaneTribune

Originally published as The inconceivable truth: our jobs are not coming back