The last Labor Day (as we know it)
Today, the US celebrates Labor Day, paying tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers. It has been a federal holiday since 1894. It’s a nice tradition, with families getting together with friends to barbecue outdoors and bid farewell to summer.
However, this Labor Day 2020 feels different. It may be the shelter-in-place orders. Or the 2 million acres that have burned in California so far this year.
More significantly, labor itself has been going through changes — in the US and around the world — over the last two decades. The pandemic has accelerated this process across most industries. To understand these changes, we need to go way back, to the late 1800s around the time when Labor Day was created.
At the time, America was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. Making the transition from agrarian to industrial society meant that both where labor took place (urban vs. rural settings, factories vs. fields) and the type of labor (repetitive, almost mechanical work vs. following the cycle of life for plants and animals) was changing.
That is happening again, this time with a transition from industrial, machine-enhanced manufacturing towards software-mediated labor. Only this time, the change will come faster and more furious, impacting even more people. Those who embrace it stand to benefit significantly from it.
So what is software-mediated labor? This can best be understood with an example. Let’s say you need to dig a bunch of holes. (What for? It doesn’t matter for the sake of this example. You just need the holes dug pronto.) In prehistoric times, you would have been limited by how much you could dig with your bare hands; admittedly people back then probably had much stronger nails than we do now, but hole-digging ability would have still been seriously limited.
We’d need to advance a couple million years, to the late Iron Age about 2,000 years ago, before something resembling modern shovels became available, thus enabling much more effective digging than their predecessor tools made of animal parts or wood. Shovels have improved somewhat since then, and of course are still used today, enabling much more effective digging of holes than with bare hands but still requiring significant human effort.
Then right when the first Labor Day was celebrated came the excavator. For the first time, instead of strength, an operator’s skill became more important. Beyond the efficiencies and effort savings, this enabled much larger holes at grander scale than were previously possible.
Now fast forward back to the present, where autonomous machines, including large, purpose-built equipment as well as smaller machines that traditionally required someone to sit on/inside it to run it, can operate for the most part without direct human operation.
This enables a whole new model; let’s call it holes-as-a-service. Human labor — or at least human intelligence — is still required, as these machines are not truly autonomous. In reality, these machines (some of us call them robots) can be pretty limited in their operating range, requiring very frequent human intervention and direction, and also pretty inflexible. Just like you wouldn’t use a shovel to build a computer, the current generation of machines are typically single-purpose, not unlike most manual or power tools.
What changes, however, is that labor can be decoupled from location. Through a combination of sensors, mobile computing, wireless communications, cloud and AI, an operator can be literally anywhere: in an air conditioned room nearby or in another continent. Moreover a single person may be able to supervise many machines at once, and only jump in when needed or to use judgment in light of unforseen circumstances.
One way to think about this is as technology augmenting human capacity. People operate software, which in turn directs the operation of the hardware to carry out tasks in the physical world. Currently, this is only possible for a limited set of tasks, such as scubbing floors at an airport, moving pallets in a warehouse or finding for weeds in a field. Over the next few years, the number of tasks will grow exponentially, thus dramatically and forever changing what labor means.
That’s not to say that manual labor will go away, just like agriculture wasn’t completely replaced by manufacturing, or manufacturing by digital processes. However, the focus will shift to human augmentation: empowering people to get more done with less effort and at greater scale than ever before.
In this world, will traditional labor continue to play a central role or will we celebrate the machines that liberated us from doing back-breaking work?
