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| Robotics in medicine |
By Steve Lohr, The New York Times, October 23, 2011
A faltering economy
explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has
sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according
to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the
central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be
published on Monday.
“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the
authors write.
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for
Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal
research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on
technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for
the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of
advancing technology.
Indeed, they were originally going to write a book titled, “The
Digital Frontier,” about the “cornucopia of innovation that is going on,” Mr.
McAfee said. Yet as the employment picture failed to brighten in the last two years,
the two changed course to examine technology’s role in the jobless recovery.
The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout
from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian
Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology
is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm
and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in
the future may have white-collar business process jobs — and we have a
problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.
The M.I.T. authors’ claim that automation is accelerating is not
shared by some economists. Prominent among them are Robert J. Gordon of
Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who contend that
productivity improvement owing to technological innovation rose from 1995 to
2004, but has trailed off since. Mr. Cowen emphasized that point in an e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” published this year.
Technology has always displaced some work and jobs. Over the years,
many experts have warned — mistakenly — that machines were gaining the upper
hand. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a “new disease” that
he termed “technological unemployment,” the inability of the economy to create
new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.
But Mr. Brynjolfsson and Mr. McAfee argue that the pace of automation
has picked up in recent years because of a combination of technologies
including robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory
control, voice recognition and online commerce.
Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the
authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be
distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language
to another and recognizing patterns. So automation is rapidly moving beyond
factories to jobs in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services
sector, which provides most jobs in the economy.
During the last recession, the authors write, one in 12 people in
sales lost their jobs, for example. And the downturn prompted many businesses
to look harder at substituting technology for people, if possible. Since the
end of the recession in June 2009, they note, corporate spending on equipment
and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat.
Corporations are doing fine. The companies in the Standard &
Poor’s 500-stock index are expected to report record profits this year, a total
$927 billion, estimates FactSet Research. And the authors point out that
corporate profit as a share of the economy is at a 50-year high.
Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they
observe, is higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still
the economy, they write, did not add to its total job count, the first time
that has happened over a decade since the Depression.
The skills of machines, the authors write, will only improve. In 2004,
two leading economists, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, published “The New Division of Labor,” which analyzed
the capabilities of computers and human workers. Truck driving was cited as an
example of the kind of work computers could not handle, recognizing and
reacting to moving objects in real time.
But last fall, Google announced that its robot-driven cars had logged thousands of miles on American roads
with only an occasional assist from human back-seat drivers. The Google cars,
Mr. Brynjolfsson said, are but one sign of the times.
As others have, he pointed to I.B.M.’s “Jeopardy”-playing computer,
Watson, which in February beat a pair of human “Jeopardy”
champions; and Apple’s new personal assistant software, Siri, which responds to voice commands.
“This technology can do things now that only a few years ago were
thought to be beyond the reach of computers,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said.
Yet computers, the authors say, tend to be narrow and literal-minded,
good at assigned tasks but at a loss when a solution requires intuition and
creativity — human traits. A partnership, they assert, is the path to job
creation in the future.
“In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even
scientific discovery,” they write, “the key to winning the race is not to
compete against machines but to
compete with machines.”
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