Steel Driving Man

An old folk song tells of one Mr. John Henry whose profession consisted of driving a steel rod with a hammer into the side of a granite mountain, making a hole that would hold some dynamite.  When ignited, the resulting explosion would remove a portion of the granite, eventually producing a railway tunnel.  Legend says he raced a steam engine powered drilling machine to see if he could drill faster than it did.  He won, but the effort killed him.  Subsequently, such devices displaced the steel driving professionals who apparently went on to find other careers.  The moral might suggest one should not fight progress.

Recently, two famous Harvard dropouts have delivered speeches to the graduating class of 2017 warning of a similar impending disruption to the workplace.  Although a generation apart, both made a name for themselves in computer technology.  Obviously I am talking about Mark Zuckerberg who gave his address at Harvard and Bill Gates who, fittingly, posted his in an open letter on Twitter..  They warn that robots will be replacing tens of millions of jobs in the foreseeable future.

To be fair, both Zuckerberg and Gates also opined that this coming wave of automation need not have a crippling effect on our nation nor the world at large.  They did suggest individuals would need to find new jobs, possibly in different fields.  And these displaced workers would need to redefine their own self-image, reevaluating their personal metrics of self-worth.

That society appears to be on the cusp of such a revolution currently seems to be inevitable.  Forrester Research recently produced a paper estimating that 25 million jobs will see robots replacing human counterparts over the next ten years.  While they also believe 15 million new jobs will open due to the same forces, an obvious shortfall still exists totaling some one million jobs annually.  Scary stuff perhaps, until we look a little bit deeper.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports monthly on the number of jobs both lost and created.  For instance, in March, they reported our economy lost roughly 5.1million jobs due to "quits, layoffs, discharges, and other separations."  Simultaneously, 5.3 million jobs were added, resulting in a net gain of some 200,000 jobs in March, in line with the twelve month trend.  In other words, America has been producing enough new jobs to cover the ten million estimated lost positions more than twice over.  Inconvenient for some to be sure, but hardly a factor by itself that would lead to a major disruption in the workforce.               (by J R)