Evolution of Work

This chapter examines the evolution of work in our societies. This examination sets up the stage for discussing the problem of unemployment and solving it. The main conclusion drawn from this examination is: Unemployment is a big problem today. Based on the evolution of work and its expected future trend, and if we do nothing about it, unemployment will be an ever-growing problem. That is the reason that we need to tackle the problem of unemployment fully.

There are numerous small sections in this chapter, each section discusses some concept that contributes to employment or unemployment. Within these sections we will discuss the following concepts: Work, Ownership, Cooperation, Barter, Money, Wages, Goods and Tools, Profit, Efficiency, Productivity, Specialization, Education, Producers, Consumers, Profitability, Competition, Advertising, Marketing, Intellectual Property, Machines, Mechanization, Factories, Capital, Enterprises, Computers, Software, Automation, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Discussing all that would paint a sufficiently detailed picture of our "Current Situation" regarding employment and unemployment and give hints about its future evolution.

Work

The purpose of work is to provide some benefit to someone. We work because we think there is some benefit that someone derives from it. Usually, the one who does the work also tries to derive some benefit from it. Usually we seek materialistic benefits, like gaining some money or growing something or making something. The benefit might also be emotional in nature, like feeling good. The benefit might also be intellectual in nature, like gaining knowledge. The benefit could also be pleasure, like the pleasure of creating something.

Several tens of thousands of years ago, humans would go from place to place in search of food; that was work. A few thousand years ago, we started settling down in one place and started farming; that was also work. Starting with the industrial revolution, we invented non-animal powered machines and started using them to do farming with much higher capabilities. More recently, we are building vertical farms in urban areas that use "grow lights"; we are building image recognition software to identify weeds and remove them using robots. That is also work.

Ownership

If we own some raw materials, put in some work and make something out of those raw materials, then we own the thing that we made. This is obvious.

If we do not own the raw materials and yet use the raw materials, put in some work and make something out of it, then who owns the output of our work?

If we say that the one who puts in the work owns the creation of the work, then by a trivial application of this logic, we would be allowing stealing. This is because if we use the logic of putting in some work, then stealing is putting in the minimal work on something someone else owns and then claiming the ownership of the resulting object. The work put in could be as simple as "I removed the dust on it". Thus, any output produced from raw materials is owned by the owner of the raw materials.

If we own the raw materials, then we own the finished products. Work does not grant us the ownership of the output of the work.

Cooperation, Barter, Money, Wages

A few tens of thousands of years ago, human society was based primarily on cooperation and deriving benefits from that cooperation. This cooperation could be to find sources of food and water, hunting, and building shelter.

As we progressed, we became more aware of our individuality and our special talents and started using them to make things. We started exchanging these things, and this sort of exchange led to the concept of barter.

We also adopted the idea of individual ownership and an individual as an independent member of society who does whatever he or she wishes as long as it does not hurt others. This allowed people to produce whatever they desired and were good at; barter became a common way of producing and consuming.

Eventually we figured out that we needed something independent to measure the "worth" of the things that we barter, and the idea of money was born.

With the idea of money, now we could offer money for work. We could request someone to do some work for us using our raw materials and in exchange for this work give them some of our money. Thus was born the idea of "wages".

Goods and Tools

Intuitively speaking, almost everything that we make can be classified as either a "product" or a "produce". The difference between product and produce is that the first is not used for nutrition, while the second is used for nutrition. Products and produce are collectively referred to as "goods".

Almost every work that we do requires tools. As with everything, a tool needs to be created by someone so that we can buy the tools, own them and use them.

There was a time when we humans used the most rudimentary tools, like sticks and stones. These tools were simple and readily available in nature. These tools were manually operated and had limited power.

Since these early times, we have been evolving, and we have been developing more tools. These tools started getting specialized; like spears, bows, arrows, plows, wheels and carts, etc.

With the advent of the bronze and iron ages, we have been gaining knowledge, developing technology and skills. To get a sense of the amount of progress we had accomplished even before the industrial revolution, consider that we had invented the telescope, made tower clocks of great precision and even arm watches and pocket watches. All this time, our tools also have been gaining in specialization and complexity.

Tools suffer wear and tear during their use in making the goods; they require maintenance. Tools do not last forever and eventually have to be replaced.

Profit

When we own the raw materials and tools and use them to produce goods, we are doing it for some benefit of ours. Usually the benefit we are seeking is that of selling the goods to someone who desires those goods in exchange for money. That is, we are planning to sell each item of the goods for a price, and we choose a selling price that gives us some benefit.

The selling price per item that we seek should be more than what we have spent on making of the goods. When we account for what we spend in the making the goods, we have to include the cost of raw materials. Further, we also have to account for the cost of buying and owning the tools, as well as the cost of maintaining the tools. Sometimes, instead of accounting for the cost of buying the tools, people account for the cost of replacing the tools. In both cases, the perspective is that a tool lasts for some amount of time and in that amount of time it can be used to produce some number of goods and hence the selling price per item should be able to recover the cost of those tools over their productive lifespan.

Suppose that we buy some tools and some raw materials and create just one item and sell that item and discard the tools as garbage and worthless, then our "cost" of making this one item is the money that we paid for the raw materials and the tools. If we set the selling price of the one item to be exactly the same as the cost of making it, then when we sell the item at this price, we would have recovered the cost of making the item and nothing more. At this price, we gain no benefit out of making this item; this price is our break-even price. In order to get some benefit out of making this item, we need to sell it at a price higher than our break-even price. When we sell the item at a price higher than the break-even price, the difference between the selling price and the break-even price is our benefit; it is our "profit".

break-even price = cost of raw materials + cost of tools

profit = selling price - break-even price

Profit is the natural consequence of our desire to obtain some benefit by doing some work.

Efficiency, Productivity, Specialization

If we make more than one item using the tools that we had, then the cost of the tools gets distributed over all the items that we make using the tools. If the tool is useful in making something, we will continue using it. If the tool is sturdy, then it will last for a long time and will be useful in making many items.

This repeated use of the same tool till it lasts happens because we do not want to waste things. We would like to get the full use out of it. We would like to get full use out of it because we paid for it, and we paid for it using the money that we earned from our earlier labor, and we do not want to waste the efforts of that labor. Of course, all this is obvious; it is common sense.

Thus, we instinctively reduce the cost per item by maximizing the use of our tools and the use of our raw materials. We use them as efficiently as we can. If we do this sort of calculation, then we should expect others to do this same calculation as well.

Thus, in the ideal situation, there is no wastage in producing various things we produce. In practice, wastage occurs because of some sort of lack of knowledge or lack of skill. Knowledge and skills are desirable to avoid wastage.

While efficiency is the idea of reducing the cost per item, productivity is the idea of doing more with the same amount of resources. While efficiency focuses on doing things as well as they can be done, productivity focuses on doing things differently in order to find better ways of getting more out of the resources one has.

The quest for efficiency leads to perfection, and the quest for productivity leads to innovation and invention.

Specialization and Education

In the dual quests for efficiency and productivity, we focus on the things that we are good at and produce more of that which we are good at producing. We seek knowledge and skills in our chosen activities so that we can be better, we can be efficient and productive. Both quests require knowledge and skills, and that leads to specialization.

Specialization helps us in satisfying our needs and wants; with minimal wastage and minimal effort. Specialization leads us to a better life and increases our well-being.

We are not born with knowledge and skills, though we are born with intelligence, learning ability and talents. Education is our way of taking us from not knowing much at birth to being specialists, experts and masters of useful activities by the time we get to 30 years of age.

Without education and an education system, we could not have solved the numerous problems that we have solved and that we will solve. Without education, just with self-learning, specialization is difficult for most humans.

With education, we bring specialization to masses and that helps us all to lead a better life. With education, we enable ourselves to achieve the well-being of all humans.

Producers, Consumers, etc.

When we make the items, we are called manufacturers. When we buy some items from someone, we are the customers. Manufacturers produce items and customers consume the items. Thus, they are also called producers and consumers, respectively.

Not every kind of work leads directly in producing something. Some kinds of work could be merely tasks like obtaining a haircut, mowing the lawn, watering the crop, cleaning up the chicken coop, stacking away the raw materials and finished goods, fixing a broken dishwasher, etc. These are tasks, and each such task requires some specialized skill to do it. People specialize in doing specific kinds of tasks depending on their liking, abilities, education and awareness of the presence of a need to do the specific kinds of tasks. These people are service providers, and those people who ask for these services to be rendered to them are service seekers. Service seekers are the customers of service providers.

Similar to manufacturing, providing services is profitable if the price asked for providing those services is more than the cost of providing the services. Similar to manufacturing, providing services requires knowledge and skills and is a specialized activity.

Profitability

We work on those things that we are good at, offer our goods and services to others in exchange for money at a profit, and that profit is used in satisfying our needs and wants.

If the profit that we make is just enough to satisfy our needs, then we can survive, but we will not be able to satisfy our wants. In order for us to be able to satisfy our wants as well, we will need to make a higher level of profit per item or sell a much larger number of items at a lower level of profit.

In order to satisfy all our wants, we desire more profits, we desire an ability to generate more profits, we desire profitability.

Competition

Manufacturing and providing services can be done by anyone, because we have freedom. The same kind of goods and the same kinds of services can be provided by many people. Thus, there is competition. Competition is a natural situation because the kinds of things that a single individual desires are perhaps only a few hundred, whereas billions of people create the products and services.

The customers or the consumers of these goods and services are also on their own dual quests for efficiency and productivity. They are trying to maximize the things that they can consume with the same amount of money; that is, they are seeking a lower price for the same thing.

The net results of the competition between producers and desire of consumers to have things at a lower price leads to the general lowering of the price of goods and services. While competition in manufacturing and providing services is good for the consumers, it is not so good for competing producers and the service providers.

In a society, the citizens are both the consumers and also the producers and service providers. Thus, in general and as far as improving our quality of life is concerned, competition is neutral.

Specialization occurs naturally out of our desire to be efficient and productive. Competition provides a further impetus to specialization. Specialization directly contributes to improving our quality of life.

Advertising and Marketing

In order to have more profitability, one needs to reduce costs. In order to have higher total profits, one needs to increase sales. In order to go beyond just higher profits, one needs to create innovative products and services that people may desire and may be willing to buy. In order to ensure that these innovative products and services are known to people, the producers of these products and services need to advertise and market them.

Consumers are also trying to get better kinds of things and are more than willing to discard less useful kinds of things; they are looking for things that will make their life qualitatively better. This kind of desire explains why consumers choose newer kinds of things and discard older kinds of things. This is why they do not just go for the cheaper options, they can also go for vastly different products and services.

Advertising and marketing are beneficial for both the producers and consumers.

Intellectual Property

Innovative people are by and large equally capable. So if someone innovates something or invents something, their competitors can buy that thing, reverse engineer and start competing. For the originator of the innovative ideas, this competition can easily erode the advantage that they possess in obtaining profits from newer products.

Society desires newer and better things and hence grants these inventors a limited time exclusive use of their inventions; this is called granting patents. During the time in which a patent is in force, others cannot use the methods mentioned in the patents without licensing such use from the holders of those patents. This is an instance of society limiting our freedoms. The exclusivity that a patent grants the patent holders motivates inventions. This restriction of freedoms is not just to benefit the innovators, but it is to the benefit of the entire society as it allows people to have motivation to innovate, use the motivation to actually innovate and invent new things, offer these things to the rest of society for us all to benefit from them and at the same time allowing the innovator to benefit from their innovative thoughts and creations.

Machines, Mechanization, Factories, Capital, Enterprises

With the advent of the industrial revolution, the tools started getting mechanized and motorized. The power of these tools has also been increasing. With all this technological progress, modern tools are manufactured and the costs of manufacturing them are not small. The price of most tools that have great power and capacities is also high; they are not affordable for an average citizen; we are talking about tools that can make tractors, combines, harvesters, lathes, etc. This trend has been accelerating ever since.

So, even if individuals could afford to buy the raw metal that goes into the making of a car, individuals cannot possibly afford the tools to convert the raw metal into a car.

This unaffordability of the tools of manufacture has led to the creation of organizations that we call private enterprises. Private enterprises are organizations of people where many people contribute their resources and collectively own the organization. With the collective resources that are at the disposal of the organization, the organization can afford to buy the expensive tools and produce goods using them. These expensive tools of manufacture started having a better name: "means of production".

Owners of these private enterprises do not necessarily work in the production aspects, they hire other people who have skills required to operate and use these means of production. With the creation of such private enterprises, we could use the expensive machinery and produce more in the same amount of time. This has led to the increase in the availability of various kinds of goods to all of us. Growing success of industrialization rapidly replaced the way we produce things; machines started being used instead of human skills. Large factories employed people to operate machines and thus produce a greater quantity of things.

This mechanization made economies of scale possible. Factories can make products at a much lower cost as compared to making it manually. Many previously hand-made products started being produced by machines, plenty of artisans and craftsmen lost their prior means of employment, and had to learn new skills in order to support their needs and wants. Technological progress continued.

This progression of advances in the tools that help us do the work is the origin of many concepts; concepts that we identify by various names like capital, enterprises, employment, management, hourly wages, annual salaries, advertising, marketing, etc.

Computers and Software

The next big change in our work life was the advent of computers and software. Computers are tools quite unlike any before them.

It started in the last half of the twentieth century. Before computers, there were calculators, but still most of the work was done by humans. With computers, we started using them to record accounting transactions and do all that accounting. It grew from there to inventory accounting, inventory management and even just-in-time inventory. Factories and enterprises gained a new level of efficiency. This also reduced the need for humans.

Scientific calculations can be done by computers and this accelerated the progress of technology. Computers can be used to prove mathematical theorems. New branches of science and technology can now be explored.

Most humans now need lesser skills than they used to before. Doing mental arithmetic is getting closer to being a forgotten art. A few decades ago we could have wondered about whether we should teach our kids mathematical concepts like parabola, hyperbola, limits, derivatives and integrals. Now we may even start wondering whether our kids need to be proficient in arithmetic.

We still require some humans to create the computers and its software, interface the computers and software with other electronics and machines and for all that we still require some humans to know arithmetic and higher mathematics.

Automation

One of the innovations in the field of computers is the concept of sensors and controllers. A sensor senses something, relays that to the computer, the computer can interpret the data sent by the sensor and decide on a course of action and communicates that to a controller and the controller can control some machine by electronic and electrical triggers.

This innovation started rendering some more human work unnecessary. Earlier, in factories, there were people watching machines, controlling them with levers and buttons, stopping them when there was a problem (like something getting stuck), fixing the problem and then restarting the machines. Plenty of people were employed in sensing and controlling aspects of factories. Now all that can be done by computers, sensors and controllers.

Automation is the use of computers, sensors, decision logic and controllers to coordinate and do work in the presence of variability. Of course, computers cannot think and make decisions. They are merely following the logical instructions that we humans feed them, and they execute those instructions literally. These instructions are in the form of automation software.

What previously was merely mechanization now became automation. Even more work could be done with fewer humans. Of course, humans are required to manufacture the computers, write the automation software and maintain all of that. Even then, on a per human basis, more work is accomplished. If more work was not getting accomplished by using automation, we would not be using automation.

Furthermore, humans can make errors, whereas computers are not prone to making errors. Computers do exactly as they are told to do. Humans can make mistakes in telling computers what to do. So, as long as humans have not made mistakes in the manufacturing of computers and telling them what to do, computers work error free, don't need breaks and can work all the time. Thus, mechanized and automated factories can function for far more time as compared to earlier factories that we staffed with humans. Automated factories produce more per unit time.

Airlines were one of the early adopters of automation to fly planes. Aircraft were one of the first to get an "autopilot". Human pilots can actually take a nap! That was already accomplished a few decades ago. Many other kinds of vehicles use significant amounts of automation, which implies that humans need lesser amounts of skill and have to pay a lesser amount of attention to the work being done.

With automation, we entered the space-age. Instead of sitting in a rocket and controlling the thrusters manually, we could let computers do all the sensing and controlling. We created the space shuttle, space station and satellites. We can put a telescope in space, tell it what region of space to observe and when. These telescopes can even coordinate with ground based telescopes and automatically turn their gaze to observe currently occurring phenomena detected by some ground telescopes (like sources of gravitational waves). We can observe the universe better, photograph black holes and know more about it.

In most areas, automation has expanded human capabilities significantly.

In some areas, machines and humans have reversed their roles. There are some jobs where machines tell humans what to do. A good example of this is a very large warehouse stocked with hundreds of thousands of items. Computers keep a record of what is where. When some customer orders a product, computers relay this information to the automation system, of which humans are just one part. Automated carts drive the human around the warehouse, mechanized lifts take the human to the right shelf, and the communication devices tell the human which item to pick and get back to the automated cart. The printer in the cart prints out a delivery label and the human sticks it on the item. The cart then drives the human to a conveyor belt and the human places the item on the conveyor belt. Further automation takes the item to the appropriate loading area where other humans load the items into bigger cartons and place the bigger cartons into delivery trucks and so on and so forth.

The role reversal between machines and humans has occurred because machines and automation still lack the "basic human abilities and intelligence". The basic human abilities and intelligence comes into play when humans use their sight, dexterity and touch in picking up one item without letting other items fall or tumble. Machines and automation need these basic human abilities and intelligence to fully complete tasks, which they currently lack.

For work, the need for highly knowledgeable and highly skilled humans still exists. However, the need for knowledgeable and skillful humans is on a steep decline in the work arena.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

The innovations and inventions in computers are not done yet. We are working on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Essentially, we are trying to get machines, computers and automation to do things the way humans learn and do. We are trying to mimic basic human abilities and intelligence in a machine.

Research and development in ML and AI is progressing. Machines are being "taught" things like image recognition, voice interpretation, walking, running, fetching, placing, being gentle with fragile things, etc. Since machines do not get tired, they can potentially do everything humans can do, just much better, faster and all the time.

In some aspects of human intelligence, machines are indeed better than humans. With even the rudimentary ML and AI, computers now have beaten the best humans in games requiring human intelligence; games like chess and go. But ML and AI have not progressed far enough to enable our machines, computers and automation to take over all aspects of doing all the work.

With ML and AI, automation can be taken to the next higher level. Eventually, a day may come when humans do not have to do a single thing. At that time, humans will not have to work. There will be no need for employment. When that happens, all our current notions of ownership and economics will have to be abandoned. At that time, we all can enjoy all the goods and services that our machines will create for all of us.

But, that day is still far off in the future.

For now, building machines that can do everything that basic human abilities and intelligence can do is somewhere between impossible and outrageously expensive. At the same time, because so much other work has been mechanized and automated, there are plenty of humans who are unemployed and hence human labor is cheap and hence the role reversal discussed previously.

Current Situation

The discussion in all previous sections paints a sufficiently detailed picture of our current situation regarding employment and unemployment and gives hints about its future evolution.

Some individuals are focusing on solving specific technological problems mentioned in the prior sections. They have the freedom to do so. They should continue to have that freedom.

We ought to use our intelligence and freedom to think about all that, read between the lines and see the writing on the wall.

The real issue is that in any society where resources and energy are not free, citizens will need to work to enable their own well-being; because only a very few citizens will be so rich that they don't need to work for their well-being. Thus, citizens will need employment.

We will not get to a state of free resources and free energy any time soon. Unemployment is a big problem today. Based on the evolution of work and its expected future trend, and if we do nothing about it, unemployment will be an ever-growing problem.

Making our society better, much better, and even the best possible is a social endeavor. We can focus on the well-being of all humans, use any technology that exists today, and solve the problems. That will lead us to an ideal society.

That is the reason that we need to tackle the problem of unemployment fully.