Review: The Automated Nation - Future Human
This was my first Future Human event, organised by the guys behind Bad Idea magazine. All in all it was an enjoyable evening - with the relaxed atmosphere a welcome veneer covering some insightful thinking, even if it went off at a tangent at times!
The central premise was that middle class jobs like accountancy, journalism (and what a lot of journalists there were in attendance!) and stockbroking were being made extinct in the same way that the blacksmiths and the wheel tappers were in the 20th century by mechanisation.
The first half of the talk was a whistle stop primer on how algorithms were transforming media, baseball, wine, and architecture. Interesting, but if you’d read Moneyball, SuperCrunchers or the Demand article in Wired nothing new (although I did learn something about algorithmic architecture).
The range of jobs that are safe from the machine was few, we were warned, although little conception was given to the idea that new jobs that we couldn’t imagine would rise to take their places. An accountant would have looked a dying species in the face of the calculator, but they are still charging (higher!) fees today despite Excel. See David Wood’s review of the evening for a great report on potential jobs that might spring up in the future.
A volunteer (a journalist no less!) was then advised by the audience on how he could ‘upskill’ to avoid redundancy. One suggestion was that in an era where machines can produce better, quicker, cheaper content, the only option is to deliver personal service. As a rent boy. The Future Human events are those kind of events!
After an interval - for pints and roll ups rather than tea and biscuits - the panel discussion got started, with a range of speakers including academics, algorithmic entrepreneurs and journalists.
Despite the title, the panel discussion often broadened into deeper questions about humanity’s relationship with technology, rather than strictly looking at the economic and social consquences on the middle class - no bad thing given the interesting range of topics covered, including:
- the idea that humanity and technology are inextricably intertwined (e.g. Google’s massive and regular human review and intervention to ensure the continued relevance of their search results)
- the imperceptible ways in which our relationship with technology is affecting us and our social relationships
- the potential for technology to relieve humans of the ‘grunt work’
- the sheer unpredictability of technological and social interaction
- the inevitability of regulation
Given the expansive nature of the discussion perhaps the lack of focused conclusions can be excused, although I feel that a little more exploration of the title topic might have enabled some more considered conclusions to be reached.
Personally, I feel that while technological advances will transform work - I remain skeptical that we can predict how this might happen.
I share David Wood’s optimism that new jobs will emerge, but not his optimism that these will be accompanied by increased leisure time, or that this will be socially beneficial.
While we might have technically more leisure time today than 100 years ago, I’m not sure that most people would agree that monotonous work has been eradicated and that we’ve reached a new era of leisured enjoyment. It could also be argued that the cognitive surplus released by the industrial revolution has been largely socially damaging - with shallow consumerism and mindless television filling the void.
For me a number of key questions remain unanswered:
Are the early signs that our cognitive surplus is being deployed towards a ‘hobby economy’ that isn’t defined solely through the traditional labour/wage lens correct?
If technology can liberate people from the tedium of information processing in the same way that mechanisation released people from the physical pressures of manual labour, will there be a societal shift as we cease to define ourselves by our paid employment in the post-industrial age? More importantly, how will this shift manifest itself?
For all those morning people out there the 
