The documentary ‘Humans Need Not Apply‘ was viewed over five million times, the possibility of mass unemployment due to advances in artificial intelligence and robotics seems to be a big concern of the public, Silicon Valley giants and futurists alike. This concern is not necessarily a new one. Fears of jobs being lost to immigrants or machines have existed since the dawn of the industrial revolution. But these science fiction futures that both delight and terrify us remain elusive, productivity has levelled out and innovation is largely stuck at ‘good enough’. To explain why this is possible the case requires an examination of the relationship of technology and innovation to business competition and labour, as well as the political economy of employment.

Innovation is the result of careful planning. Engineers operate off of a set of assumptions and objectives. There is a problem statement. Dramatic innovation doesn’t just happen thanks to plucky tech-heads in a garage igniting runaway discoveries. Mass unemployment thanks to automation is not an inevitable linear trend unless there is also change in our attitude towards work. This is possibly why we don’t live in a Jetsons world of flying cars in the 21st century. We get ‘good enough’ when the problem statement is formulated within the bounds of the given and the assumptions are not challenged. Innovation driven by the competitive demands of business competition leads to ‘good enough’, not science fiction utopias.

A trivial but useful example is the history of commercial flight technology, today we have the A380 and not the Concorde. If cheap flights across the globe in the shortest time possible were a matter of uttermost political urgency (insert crazy SF scenario here), imagine what kinds of aircraft we’d have now. Today, aircraft speeds perfectly reflect current requirements, and super-sonic or space flight is limited to the military and rich daredevils. Demands for greater capacity and energy efficiency drive aircraft innovation today, not speed. Sure, someone might invent a warp drive in their garage, which might disrupt the entire aircraft industry. But the probability of that actually happening is extremely remote given the amount of resources required for aeronautics R&D. Everyone loves a maverick (Elon Musk’s SpaceX), but it just seems silly to focus so much attention and speculation on the possibility of a ‘kid in a garage’ scenario or of the emergence of some new freak technology (AI). No aircraft today was a eureka moment, it was the result of decades of research and planning. Innovation in supply chains, manufacturing technologies and industrial automation functions in much the same way.

If the underlying social and political assumption that work is necessary and good doesn’t change, then the present concern of automation just rocking up and causing mass unemployment is a distraction, yet another dream of a future that never arrives. If we apply the example to manufacturing, engineers aren’t Space Odyssey monoliths causing evolutionary events, they simply research the best solution to a stated problem, if the stated problem is “increase efficiency” Then they will, yes, find ways to save 5% in raw materials in a given manufacturing process, or find the best way for a worker to move in an assembly line. Maybe, the worker won’t be needed at some point (warp drive invention). But if the over-arching imperative is “work is environmentally unsustainable due to over-production and carbon pollution caused by mass daily commuting , and therefore is a problem that must be dealt with and eliminated where possible”, then the engineer’s output will reflect this problem statement. But what about the capitalist imperative to drive down labour costs through technological innovation to compete in the market? This is where Galbraith’s work on the present system he calls the corporatist bureaucracy comes in. The great corporate bureaucracy hates the volatility of the market. Corporations operate mostly through planning, and they alone have the resources to devote to aeronautical or manufacturing R&D. it is the bureaucratic technostructure that plans the course of innovation today in ways the communist Soviets could only have dreamed of doing. Boeing, Airbus, Microsoft, IBM, GE

We’ll be stuck with ‘good enough’, because at a certain point, whether due to fears of civil unrest or due to diminishing cost savings by replacing humans with machines, directed investment in automation innovation will cease, either by explicit policy directives or market pressures. If it is cheaper to hire slave labour in developing countries rather than make a robot that replaces human labour, then there is no economic incentive to innovate. The corporate bureaucracy is boring, conservative and bureaucratic. Remember who invented the internet, it was DARPA. Who invented WiFi, CISRO. Which private company would ever undertake the massive investment necessary to complete the Australian NBN?