‘All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.’ –Aristotle
It is not new to talk about the need to acquire “irreplaceable” skills. But what is not properly appreciated is the scope of the challenge this poses to people in all kinds of jobs, and the exact defining characteristic of what will make a skill “irreplaceable.”
The basic rule of economics after the Industrial Revolution is: if a task can be automated, it will be. Or to put it differently, if a worker can be replaced by a machine, he will be. Call it the principle of expendability. The only thing that has changed since the first power loom is the number and nature of the tasks that can be automated. The first thing the Industrial Revolution did was to automate physical tasks. But now we are beginning to automate mental tasks, and what we are just beginning to see is the scope of the mental work that can be automatized. It is much wider than you probably think.
An awful lot of work that is usually considered to require human intelligence really doesn’t. Instead, these tasks require complex memorization and pattern recognition, perceptual-level skills that can be reduced to mechanical, digitized processes and done by a machine. These include many tasks that currently fill the days of highly educated, well paid professionals.
Take doctors. A recent article by Farhad Manjoo, the technology columnist for Slate, describes how computers have begun to automate the screening of cervical cancer tests. A task that used to be done by two physicians, who could only process 90 images per day, can now be done with better results by one doctor and a machine, processing 170 images per day. (…)
One more example. I recently came across a story about a composer and music theorist who created a computer program that writes cantatas in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. (A cantata is a short piece with a well-defined structure, which makes the task a little easier.) The climax of the story is a concert in which an orchestra played a mixture of the computer’s compositions and actual Bach cantatas. An audience of music experts could not reliably determine which was which.
illustration { Julian Murphy }
