| A thousand times this. One example is efficiency. "Why," say the optimists, "would corporations continue to employ more people than they strictly need to?" Implicit in the question is a characterization of the corporation as a rational, singular entity. And I say that 'optimists' ask this question because one of the large questions that some smart people ask is "where's the massive productivity increase that (one supposes) would accompany a surge in jobs-reducing automation?" But if we just move down the chain a bit, and re-ask the question in terms of the actual top-down management of these companies, conclusions present themselves. And it's basically that hierarchical, traditional organizations may be bad at reaping these benefits, and they may need to be killed off/severely threatened by newcomers to change their ways. There are a lot of unnecessary jobs hanging around, for totally rational reasons. Ask yourself: "Why would any particular manager prefer to have more people working under him, rather than fewer?" "Why would a Department Head with many direct reports not be eager to work with another Department head to closely co-operate in a way that reduces both headcount and duplication of management effort?" "If a certain corporate fiefdom is becoming more efficient due to automation in certain areas of its operations, could there be any motivation for the manager of that fiefdom to expand other areas of his operations instead of passing on the full benefits of that efficiency in the form of a possibly-reduced budget?" It should be clear to everyone that we are being limited by the structure of the organizations themselves. And we are seeing increasing activity in self-organized companies, cooperatives, etc, at the fringes (and also of extremely-integrated larger companies like Apple under Jobs, which is an old-model solution to the problem of the inefficiencies inherent in very hierarchical organizations). The newer-model organizations may be better able to reap the benefits of automation. TL;DR: humans used to be increasingly necessary as wet robots for manufacturing, and then largely moved up the food chain to bureaucracy when real robots made the wet ones inconvenient. Mostly-unnecessary jobs have more-or-less stuck around because of the limitations of organizations, not technology. |