Call the bank. Call your cable company. Call your airline. Call just about anybody you’re doing business with and what do you get? Automation. Press 1 for this, 2 for that & 3 to stay on hold for the next 90 minutes.
That little robot is eating our lunch.
When you discuss this with people, they generally regard it as a nuisance. Sure, it’s annoying, but what harm does it really do?
Immense harm.
Automation has and will continue to have two destructive impacts on American society: the disintegration of jobs and the erosion of human-to-human communication.
Jobs
There’s a big problem coming. Nowadays there aren’t enough jobs and many of the available jobs are dead ends, with insufficient salaries and no health benefits. Couple that with population projections expecting 8-10 billion people by 2050 (only 35 years away) and you realize we’ll need to find a hell of a lot of jobs! Where are they coming from?
Gone are the days when companies like General Motors, General Electric and IBM had hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs with near lifetime employment. Instead they’ve been replaced by companies like Walmart, who compensate their employees as little as possible and Amazon, who produce $71 billion in revenue with just 200,000 employees.
Google is worth $660 billion. They employ only 61,000 people full-time.
Projections are that up to 1/3 of all jobs will be automated in the coming decade. Where are hundreds of millions of people going to find work? Do you believe governments and corporations will step up and train people for today’s technologically-based world?
Call me cynical but I don’t.
People need to start thinking about this now. Don’t wait. Figure out what skills you’ll need in the next in 5, 10, 20 years. And then go learn them.
Communication
When Areena launched our Everybody Eats initiative in July, NY1 covered the event extensively. Our phones never stopped ringing. The calls came from everywhere. Organizations wishing to participate. Seniors looking for food. New Yorkers wanting to donate to the cause. Every single person who called was greeted by a human voice. Their time was treated with respect.
The lunch-eating robot may be cost effective for the company but nothing can replace contact between two people. Why would we, as a society, allow anything less?
Do you want to live in a world where a majority of people can’t find a job and nobody speaks to one another? I don’t think you do. And we all have the power to ensure that doesn’t happen.
But we have to speak up!
Art Gurwitz
Founder, Areena
Author
