
Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren't Growing - sebgr
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/january/jobs-involving-routine-tasks-arent-growing
======
kristianc
I'm interested by the classification here.

Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-
routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated. Within an industry or a
profession it seems like there could be a mix of routine and non-routine work.

Similarly, how many people's jobs have changed from being routine jobs to non-
routine jobs through either retraining or automation allowing them to take on
higher order work? Again, doesn't say.

Also, interesting to note that the actual unemployment rate for routine
congnitive, routine manual etc 2009 shock aside doesn't actually look
anomalous compared to much of the last two decades of the graph is to be
believed.

~~~
netcan
I think you've hit on the right point. I'm also always curious about how far
these definitions can and should be pushed.

Talking in terms of "automation of routine tasks" sounds reasonably
descriptive of how the spread of technology works. But, technology is a
concept that is notoriously elusive in economics. That's because it's hard to
clearly define in concrete terms useable in the context of economic theories,
whether they're mathematical conceptual.

For example, we've always been imagining "robots" as tin humans that do stuff
people where doing. You have science fiction movies, books and such being
written right now with this imagery, just like the 1950s sci fi art, Jetsons.
Just like the mechanical turk and automatons of the 1700s.

I think robots are a useful mental placeholder. "Technology will be doing task
X." But in reality, technology is usually more like "tools." Imagine a
mechanic in the future. Maybe the cars come in with better self diagnosis
before he sees them. The parts he needs are already known so he has them ready
ahead of time. An AR (or whatever) info delivery thingy tells him exactly how
to install or remove parts. etc.

What you have is a more useful mechanic. As long as a mechanic is still
involved, I think "tool" is a better description. If people are no longer
involved, "robot" seems a bit better. Ahead of time, when you are trying to
imagine where technology is going it is very hard to discern tools from
robots. Is a lawnmwer a robot? Is a a self guiding scalpel a tool?

~~~
spacehome
> What you have is a more useful mechanic.

The endgame here is that I don't need a mechanic.

~~~
netcan
Yup, potentially. In that case what you have is a more useful car, or cloud
transport service.

But endgame, where it's "robots" as we all imagine it is always a moving
target. Mechanics weren't needed 200 years ago either. So far, we've needed
new professions. Maybe that will end.

My point was just that automation is a fairly fuzzy way of explaining what is
going in.

------
btbuildem
Assisting or caring for others is not a low-skill job! It may not require a
doctorate in theoretical physics, but it requires a lot of emotional
intelligence, stamina and ability to be present with other people. It's far
from routine!

This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are
going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really
need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom?

~~~
JeremyNT
> _This immediate nitpick aside - I think it 's great that routine task jobs
> are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we
> really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom?_

Sure, it's great that we are gaining this capability, and the people working
towards it should be lauded for their progress. The issue is that many people
rely on the ability to exchange 40h/wk of routine boredom for the basic
necessities of living.

Our society assumes that most people will contribute enough value from their
"work" that they can exchange for the things they need in life. If their work
loses all value, then we need to figure out what else we can do for/with these
people.

At this point, it seems as if our engineering ability is advancing beyond the
pace of our social structures and legal system.

~~~
nly
> If their work loses all value, then we need to figure out what else we can
> do for/with these people.

Global warfare would solve this problem on all fronts. You know, if the
prospect of war these days didn't stand a good chance of ending the species.

------
awinter-py
Scary parallel here with the recent jeff dean talk about NN. He claims he
won't let his team touch any 'research task' that takes more than a week, and
prefers to stick to experiments that take under a day to set up and run --
that there's so much low-hanging fruit that every ML project should be simple.

Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a
sense routine.

I hope I'm misquoting him. But my takeaway is that between manually coding
processes that could be solved with ML & doing infrastructure profiling, most
devs are spending half their time fixing problems that are 'routine' at the
big three.

~~~
savanaly
>Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a
sense routine.

Isn't that more properly regarded as exciting than scary? The long term
benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs.

I would personally be very happy if my own current job- software developer-
were somehow automated out of existence. Not only would it allow me to put my
money where my mouth is regarding praising automation but it would mean huge
gains for the human race.

~~~
FilterSweep
> but it would mean huge gains for the human race.

This entirely depends on the model the human race is running off of. With the
current state of mass-centralization in tech (see, again, the big 3), you will
never get to experience such gains. In fact, you would quickly grow dependent
on someone else to feed and shelter you, considering you can no longer provide
a benefit to society that puts food on the table. In fact, most people
wouldn't provide value anymore.

> The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the
> temporary costs.

For _some_ people, yes. You are correct when it comes to the numbers. GDP
increases. A nation has more "wealth" to work with altogether. But the other
side of the coin is that wealth disparity becomes more extreme.

Big however - If we ran off a decentralized model - arguably the way the Web
was originally intended, I could see how the human race would be placed in an
unprecedented position for future growth, and humanity would really thrive.

Granted, regarding the current state as ""exciting"" boils down to what you
value, I guess.

When (not _if_ ) I automate myself out of existence, I'm sure as hell not
telling anyone I did it.

~~~
nostrademons
The assumption that the "current model" (I assume you mean capitalism) makes
is that people, when placed in a position where they no longer provide a
benefit to society and yet must in order to put food on the table, will find a
way to provide a benefit to society.

In my experience, this is true over longer (1-2 year) timescales, even if it's
not obvious _how_ at the outset. Most people, when made redundant, find new
ways to make themselves relevant. The process isn't exactly pleasant, but the
outcome often results in a lot more lucrative and fulfilling career than they
had before.

~~~
abakker
If you _owned_ the product of your labor (i.e. the automation of your job)
then it should make no difference. The trouble is, then when you create an
automaton that replaces a $100K/year employee, then the creator gets f __*ed.

Put another way, if you could create a way to automate your job entirely, then
there also has to be a guarantee that doing so will not result in you getting
fired. Alternatively, if you automate someone else's job, then the company
needs to be responsible for training them to do a new job. Even if this is not
practical or possible in all cases, it needs to be the case more often. Right
now, corporations pay the government to solve this problem (not voluntarily),
but the government does a pretty bad job of helping. Ideally corporations
interested in any social responsibility need to solve this problem themselves.
When the automation revolutions becomes real enough to threaten executive
jobs, I suspect they'll solve it pretty quickly.

~~~
nostrademons
Or you could automate yourself out of a job and get a new job.

There's nothing that says that jobs are sacred. Indeed, most folks born since
1980 believe that they'll have to switch jobs every few years to a.) stay
relevant and b.) get paid what they're worth.

~~~
abakker
Jobs are not sacred, but salaries are. Your automation has a certain NPV on
it, just like your job, and just like the "value" of not working. So, there
are really 3 scenarios.

a) do your job, same as always b) automate your job, and either end up
unemployed, or find a new job, still working xx hours/week. c) don't tell
anyone you automated your job, don't work, collect the money.

If you are capable of automating your job (you have the skills, the know-how
etc.) then all of these options have different moral and economic tradeoffs.

a) if you like your job, you get to keep doing it, but, by not automating it,
you are maybe not doing your job as well as it could be done, and/or are
costing the company money which could be reallocated. As an employee, you
maybe have a responsibility to automate your job and by not doing it, you are
shirking your duties (its a stretch) b)You automate your job, get a new job,
and take everyone else who was doing the same job as you and automate their
jobs as well. You end up ok, because you're talented enough to automate your
job. the other people who weren't talented enough just get fired and have no
shiny new credential. c)You are definitely dodging the obligation to your
employer, but at the same time, they don't know the difference. If the work is
unchanged, then you are free to use your time for an alternative economic
benefit. It seems unfair, since you get to double-spend your time.

In my mind, B is the choice most people worry about. There are fewer people
who can automate a job than there are people currently doing that job, and
that doesn't even touch the problem that few low-skill jobs are filled by the
people that can self-automate their jobs. So, more worrying is that someone
invents the roomba of floor waxers, or the self cleaning toilet stall and then
we don't need janitors anymore.

------
erikb
Oh well, please let us not connect softwaredevelopment and management too much
with non-routine work. On a daily basis I see so many people who work on less
than 50% of their capabilities because they haven't created routines in their
work, thinking that their work is 90% non-routine.

Think about the last time you heard how a developer tells you that you don't
need to learn the ten finger system to program well, or that he is capable of
using 10-20 programming languages. How can a person think about usability of
his software and a debuggable architecture, if he has to think about how to
put an "i" and an "f" in the text editor? How much time is left for genius
ideas when he has to look up all the time if the current language requires him
to write a try-catch or a try-except block?

~~~
leereeves
I touch type ("ten finger system") but I can see a point to the argument that
it's not necessary to program well.

Typing is only a small part of programming, and touch typing isn't a huge
benefit even for that part, considering all the numbers and symbols used,
auto-complete for identifiers and keywords, and macros for common idioms.

And it painfully overworks the right pinky.

~~~
erikb
I see your point. Typing is not the main part of programming, so just typing
faster than your colleague doesn't make you feel that much more powerful.

Let me give you another example that maybe drives the point home better: Have
you seen the videos of how Minecraft was made? A very short amount of time was
spent on getting the I/O to the filesystem to work, of setting up a window and
filling it with colors, of creating the basic 3D world. I believe that is a
huge part why not everybody can write a successful game as Minecraft. Because
I don't have trained the routines, I need to spend a considerable amount of
time getting all these basic things done before I can start with an actual 3D
game. Thus an experienced game developer is already done with his first demo
in the time I am done with the basics. And at this point he has a demo to show
for, I have nothing. So he even gains more motivation in the same time to
continue, and he may even gain some first user feedback. This will make him
code longer (huge benefit, I give up at this point) and he will also develop
more in the direction that is fun for players (huge benefit two).

It is hard to connect directly the geometrical transformation math to making a
game that is more for the players. It is in fact not directly connected. But
if you don't sit down to learn the "boring math" you can't get there. That's
what typing faster is for. It's not yielding benefits directly. But if you
learn that, learn your text editor, learn your language, learn some design
concepts, you will reach a level of competence that is not reachable without.
Of course you could also do other things to get the ideas from your head into
the computer faster, like voice input, or flow programming with touchpads. But
then you need to get into these very well to get them out of your way as well.

~~~
lmm
> Let me give you another example that maybe drives the point home better:
> Have you seen the videos of how Minecraft was made? A very short amount of
> time was spent on getting the I/O to the filesystem to work, of setting up a
> window and filling it with colors, of creating the basic 3D world. I believe
> that is a huge part why not everybody can write a successful game as
> Minecraft. Because I don't have trained the routines, I need to spend a
> considerable amount of time getting all these basic things done before I can
> start with an actual 3D game. Thus an experienced game developer is already
> done with his first demo in the time I am done with the basics. And at this
> point he has a demo to show for, I have nothing. So he even gains more
> motivation in the same time to continue, and he may even gain some first
> user feedback. This will make him code longer (huge benefit, I give up at
> this point) and he will also develop more in the direction that is fun for
> players (huge benefit two).

I think Minecraft's success is mostly luck and doesn't really prove anything.
A lot of very experienced game developers write games that fail, all the time.

You're right that as a programmer, when you start working on something you're
not yet familiar with then there will be a period in which things that are
routine and automated for someone experienced in that area are not yet routine
for you and you haven't yet automated them. I just don't see that as
particularly important. You learn how to do these things, then you automate
them, and you've only needed a small one-off extra effort compared to the
experienced programmer doing the same thing. 80% or more of the work of
writing a program isn't solving business problems directly, it's writing the
tools that make it straightforward to do the actual business problem solving.
Most of the skill of doing this is transferable, and learning 10-20 languages
really doesn't involve that much overhead.

~~~
cableshaft
Angry Birds' popularity was mostly luck and timing. Minecraft was doing
something that wasn't very well represented in video games and touched on
people's creativity, primed as children with Lego blocks, and helped create a
whole new genre. I don't think there's a parallel universe where Minecraft was
created and did not become a hit.

Sure, he did get lucky that Penny Arcade (and Kotaku, and a bunch of other
sites) covered his minecart rollercoaster video to get that initial burst of
attention to his project, and maybe you could argue that it was lucky that he
stuck with the project's development for two years in relative obscurity for
it to get developed enough to help reach its overnight success.

However, I definitely feel it was a novel enough of an experience that it
would have eventually found a way to hit the mainstream and been a big hit
regardless.

------
debacle
Isn't that the purposeful outcome of technology? "I could replace everything
you do with a script."

I know for a fact that work I have done has contributed to the demise of many
positions. Could you imagine the industry for "Internet Cataloging" if we
didn't have search engines? Email if we didn't have Gmail?

Technology is a job killer. That idea is something that's been a part of
society and literature for hundreds of years, sometimes in violent fashion.
Our economy needs to evolve in such a way that the destruction of jobs is a
net positive for society.

~~~
tomjen3
Most of the population having access to most of the worlds knowledge in the
palm of their hand is a gigantic boon to society.

What we should accept is that the time is approaching where a) it is possible
for skill and lucky people to make many millions of times more money than
those who are neither and that b) the cost communication has decreased so much
that in many cases it no longer makes sense to employ people, instead it makes
more sense to contract the work out.

This means we should do two things: stop talking about income differences and
focus on making sure the poorest have tolerable lives and b) make it much,
much, much easier to start your own small business. This means tax cuts but
above all simplifications of the relevant law.

~~~
bdavisx
I think we need to be careful about what "tolerable lives" means too. I've
seen "guaranteed income" proposals talking about something in the $25,000 USD
range or similar. That's basically poverty level - and while that's better
than nothing, it probably won't work as more and more jobs go away.

Imagine a world (or the US) where 75% of the people are at the poverty level
and 25% are "rich". How long do you think that's going to last?

~~~
maxerickson
$25,000 is a very reasonable existence for a single person, as long as it's
present buying power and after tax.

You can rent for less than $1000 and should be able to do utilities for ~$300.

That leaves about $200 a week, which is certainly not the lap of luxury, but
it's plenty for food and necessities (I've done 2 people eating well enough
for ~$100 a week so I really don't feel full of shit saying that).

There's no planning for the future in that, but part of the idea of a basic
income is to de-risk things like that no?

~~~
paulryanrogers
For the young and healthy that may be true. But we're all going to get old,
and most of us will need medical care that could easily exceed that.

~~~
maxerickson
That's fair, but that's a problem we have to solve regardless of whether a
basic income is installed or not.

(At least, if we means the US and we keep providing Medicare and similar)

------
dante9999
I wonder if you can reliably classify jobs into "nonroutine" and "routine".
There is element of routine in every work, and I'm pretty sure that even most
boring and repetitive job can be done better with some degree of creativity.
It would be really interesting to read more about reasoning behind
classification presented in this article. I mean can you seriously say there
is no "routine" in programming or management?

~~~
ktRolster
Here's a better article that discusses that:
[http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/08/is-your-job-
routin...](http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/08/is-your-job-routine-if-
so-its-probably-disappearing/)

If your work is just following instructions, then it's probably routine.

As for me, I'd like to see most middle management go away, since I largely see
it as a waste (basically, if people know how to manage themselves, you can get
rid of most middle-managers).

~~~
kristianc
It's not a knowledge problem it's a process problem. You can get rid of most
middle managers but only once you have the conditions in the business where
people can be both autonomous and aligned to the business goals.

Most middle managers end up achieving neither, but a layer of management is
the default solution that companies most end up with.

~~~
ktRolster
That is an interesting thought. I would suggest that one of the goals of the
company should be to teach people to be autonomous and aligned to the business
goals.

------
x5n1
All of this points to the fact that work is a consumer good. We need to
manufacture work just like we manufacture products. You buy work with time,
and in return you get money; after all time is money. It should be work that
we actually want to do, in an environment which we find to be psychologically
positive. We need to just call it a day for capitalism and all the other
garbage that goes with it. Let's throw away idiotic ideas like efficiency and
productivity. And let's focus on meaning. Maybe we can build a fulfilling
society rather than this madness and busi-ness we have created to produce
garbage at breaknecks speeds so capital owners can do more of the same.

For instance this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-
based_currency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency)

~~~
brbsix
Not everyone's time is worth the same. Some people have more experience,
intelligence, or can simply brute-force the task with determination.
Productive societies reward people as such, and for good reason. You're
talking about obliterating incentives as we know them. Perhaps you can test
your hypotheses in a voluntary society before advocating for a coercive state
to enact such policies.

~~~
x5n1
It's easy to account for this in terms of education. Number of years of
education should be added into the calculation for that. For instance for
every year of schooling you get a a certain percentage more currency in terms
of hours worked than someone with less schooling. And I am for all sorts of
pilot programs to explore how else we can organize society.

As for "productive societies", I don't know what that will actually mean in
the near future. Automation is 100% productive. It needs no people for that.
These terms have meaning for industrial society where people are treated like
robots. It has little meaning for society where robots produce more of the
goods. And everything else is about simply organizing society so that people
feel some sense of meaning and contentment.

At the end of the day in motivated people with money, and engineering society
in that direction, we actually get a lot of ills like burnout, alcoholism,
workaholics, etc. Yes people can be coerced by money, but often it's not for
their own good. It for the good of the owners of money so they can make more
profit. But at the same time, this sort of thing ruins the experience of life
for the worker.

~~~
sarreph
I'm not sure I agree with

> Automation is 100% productive

Because perfect (i.e. 100%) productivity is technically unobtainable because
there will always be efficiencies to be made. Yes, machines are 'always on'
and will complete a task in the most efficient way we tell them to, or that
they learn to do themselves, but I think that humans will always play a role
in raising productivity of even fully-automated systems by making efficiency
improvements.

That is for the foreseeable future anyway, until AI starts making its own
exponentially big efficiency improvements ;)

~~~
x5n1
Whatever you get there rather quickly. Things are productive enough as it is
now. It will only get better. It's irrelevant. It's sad how obsessed we have
become over terms like these, when they should not matter at all. Reality is
that art like entrepreneurship does not care about efficiency. Only factory
work does, and when it is done by robots then yes I am sure some engineer will
figure out how to squeeze that last bit of performance out of that before
starting to hit diminishing returns and getting himself fired in the process.
Eventually machines will learn how to optimize themselves, and at that point
in a very very short time they will be fully optimized and stay that way
forever. These terms will become redundant and irrelevant.

------
ktRolster
I really like Mike Rowe's viewpoint on unemployment:
[http://profoundlydisconnected.com/](http://profoundlydisconnected.com/)

~~~
Johnnybe
It's disconnected alright. There's only 3 companies advertising for jobs on
his careers page. And one of them is a franchising company (Mr. Sparky).
Trades are very competitive. Just look up the number of electricians in your
area. It's a race to the bottom in the trades.

~~~
Futurebot
Do you have more sources on this? I've been looking for good data on the
competitiveness of traditional blue-collar "trade" jobs/industry since it
started becoming the go-to panacea to all our job woes a few years ago. It
seems like plumbing, electrician work, HVAC, etc. would be pretty easily
saturated areas; how many plumbing jobs can be sustained per neighborhood, for
example?

------
jkot
With self-driving cars, drone delivery.. unemployment will get even worse.

------
atemerev
What's wrong with that? This is called "progress".

~~~
mrrrgn
Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? Our
society and economy aren't optimized for scenarios involving large scale
unemployment. What use is automation if it only leads to mass human suffering?

~~~
atemerev
Luddites were saying the same around 200 years ago, but it turned out better
than expected. Lots of new jobs were created, replacing manual labor.

~~~
ska
Not for the Luddites. This is one of the most consistently misunderstood and
misused historical lessons I run into in tech circles. The true lesson of the
Luddites isn't that "things will turn out better than you thought", it is that
"there will be casualties".

The Luddites were basically correct - they were trading "good jobs" for
fundamental unemployment. Demographically speaking the families involved did
not on average recover from the damage for a few generations.

So while from a global perspective the overall change may be positive over
time, you can't discount people out of hand for saying "wait a minute, we're
going to get screwed hard here". They may well be right. It may still be the
right thing to do.

What the policy implications of such are or should be is a separable issue.

Another potentially deep issue: the industrial revolution creating a bunch of
new jobs and job categories does not demonstrate that the same will be true of
a putative automation revolution that we are entering....

~~~
marknutter
Technological advancements displace jobs at a relatively slow pace. It doesn't
happen overnight. And as those jobs get replaced, the demand for the remaining
people who can do those jobs goes up because not all companies can afford to
automate initially. The "casualties" you mention are more likely the future
workers for a particular profession, but they're unlikely to care much having,
y'know, not been born yet.

~~~
ska
No, that is not at all what happened with the Luddites.

Which is the point, really. This is exactly the sort of assertion that is
often made ... and often the Luddites are trotted out as an example. But they
are a better _counterexample_ to what you assert than an example.

------
crdoconnor
Note that they _were_ growing faster than any other kind of job:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-
has-created-far-more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html)

------
pluma
The site's layout seems to treat my 10" android tablet in landscape mode as if
it were a first generation iPhone in portrait mode. I wonder what happens.
Faaulty browser sniffing?

