By Jordan Buie
Guest Writer
When I started attending Union University in 2006, Movie Gallery was the second largest movie rental company in the United States and Canada. By the end of April 2010, Movie Gallery had filed for bankruptcy.
One thing seemed certain: The quick disappearance of a company at the top of its market seemed less to do with the Great Recession – which was well under way – and more a result of companies’ reaction to the recession and the tool with which they had chosen to combat it.
That tool was technology.
Technology’s defeat of human employment seemed to be growing terabyte by terabyte, as the lone attendants in grocery stores man self-check-out stations, once the job of workers now laid off because of machinery.
Noticing these changes, I wrote an editorial for the “Cardinal & Cream” as a student at Union in April 2010 about technology taking over jobs. I think the former newspaper adviser chuckled, but the piece ran in the paper.
Fast forward three years.
In January, the Associated Press wire service ran a three-part series about why jobs are not coming back after the Recession.
The headline on the first piece read: “AP IMPACT: Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs.”
Right there it was, the idea from my college perspective piece reported three years later, not as mere conjecture but the consensus of many economic experts.
In the first story, reported on Jan. 23 by Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman, the writing almost restates my original thesis.
“Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers,” the story reported. “They are being obliterated by technology. Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done.”
The point the article raises is that when times were hardest during the Great Recession, companies started using computers not only to replace the jobs of blue collar workers but also those of accountants, secretaries and other white-collar, degree-requiring jobs that previously were assumed to be safe careers.
The article reports that of 3.5 million jobs lost during the Recession that paid employees between $38,000 and $68,000 a year, only 2 percent returned.
The series continued with a second article, titled “Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?” and the third, “Will smart machines create a world without work?”
Those articles bring up self-driving cars, a robotic library that finds any book and technology that makes electric company meter readers irrelevant.
The case these articles make is that the jobs most at stake are ones that are repetitive and require less creativity and critical thinking.
The article states people will still need to manage machines. But these jobs require extensive training.
In my 2010 piece, I cited Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel “Player Piano.”
“In Vonnegut’s world, capitalism’s drive for an industry driven by automated assemblies led to an overall decline in the quality of life,” I wrote. “As automated industry eliminated the need for human laborers, the lower class was left at the mercy of the upper class in hopes that they might receive some of the few available managerial positions. However, most of the jobs available required intensely-specialized, doctorate-level degrees.”
I like to think that as a writer, I have job security against a machine. But the second article said a company in Durham, N. C., is using computers to produce automated sports stories, so maybe no job is safe.
But one thing seems certain. People who live their lives awake and sincere, as creators and innovators and people who make a difference in the lives of others, these people are much harder to replace.
Perhaps the answer for not being replaced by a machine is to not live like one.
Jordan Buie, class of 2010, is a writer for The Jackson Sun and has started a website to cover the technological revolution at www.thedailyfuture.com. You can reach Jordan at jbuie@thedailyfuture.com.
