Cartoon 808: The Winner

The approach to Human labor of business is like the Ouroboros of Greek mythology. The businesses profit from reduced labor costs. This seeming good thing is really business consuming itself. Labor forms the market for its goods and services. The less business contributes to the overall financial life cycle through wages, the more the market ultimately reduces.

We witness this spiral today in the efforts businesses have made to reduce or eliminate labor costs. The first wave involved “dumbing down” job functions so they could be performed by lower skilled and paid workers. The hand scanner used in inventory and point-of-sale is a revolutionary example. Imagine how much training and dedication would be required of employees without it. This would mean businesses would need more employees and have to compensate them to a greater degree. Businesses would have an increased investment in training and development. The greater employee value would make the company put a higher priority on retaining them. In some McDonalds restaurants the cash register has food icons to make the financial transaction simpler for employees. Call centers have very defined scripts to achieve sales. Deviation from the scripts is not allowed. For the employees it becomes a boring rote activity. It allows the business to plug-in and instantly start employees with minimal training. It makes a high turn over in such operations less of a problem.

The second wave was the rush to move job functions to places in the world that had lower labor costs. Many of these places have gained the mantle of “sweatshops”, such as Foxcom that produces Apple  products.

The emerging wave is to encode cognitive functions into software, that here-to-fore could only be performed by a live person. The goal is to completely eliminate the human. We see the vanguard of this wave when we call a company’s “help” function. A voice tells us it can understand English and respond. The important part is not the voice recognition. It is the intelligence that can make sense of the nuisances in communication and execute appropriate actions. The intelligence is what is advancing and moving up the workplace hierarchy. In the target circle are both the legal and medical professions. Also targeted is investment. The opportunity is to exceed the success of a talented human in sophisticated financial analysis and prediction.

The question we need to be asking is what do we do with the surplus humans? It is a chicken and egg scenario and we have got it backward. The goal of business is to serve the people and not itself. Therefore profits purely for profit sake, is foolish and self defeating for society. In science fiction there is often some utopia envisioned. The utopia is a time of leisure. People have the ability to seek personal pursuits while their devices toil away. In the manner we are going, people that can find jobs, will be labor relegated to serfdom in subsistence menial work. Our future will be one of desperate people with a very small select group profiting. It more apply brings to mind Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie Metropolis.