A staple of workers’ compensation journalism – and seminar topics – is the dramatic change that has been occurring, and will continue to occur, in our country’s job-makeup picture.
At the College of Workers’ Compensation Lawyers Symposium (Phoenix, AZ, March 2017), for example, Peter Rousmaniere showed slides demonstrating how work injuries and deaths have continually declined in number, due in part to the changing character of the national workforce. One of his slides, for example, showed that in three high-risk occupational categories, sharp reductions of the same, as part of the overall employment marketplace, had taken place between the years 1950 and 2005. Another slide demonstrated impressive evidence of our country’s continuing shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Mr. Rousmaniere’s complete slides can be viewed at this URL: http://www.americanbar.org/groups/labor_law/committees/wccom/archive/2017papers.html.
In some regions, of course, even the service industry is taking a hit. The New York Times recently featured a story about how Johnstown, PA, has suffered in this regard. Rachel Abrams & Robert Gebeloff, In Towns Already Hit by Steel Mill Closings, a New Casualty: Retail Jobs (June 25, 2017), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/25/business/economy/amazon-retail-jobs-pennsylvania.html.
Perhaps the newest issue to be addressed in this discussion, meanwhile, is how artificial intelligence may render obsolete even more jobs. See, e.g., Elizabeth Kolbert, Our Automated Future: How Long Will it be Before You Lose Your Job to a Robot?, The New Yorker (Dec. 19 & 26, 2016), available at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/our-automated-future.
For the workers’ compensation field, an implication of this type of data – and stories – is that the fewer injuries which will take place, because of the changing workforce, is a smaller volume of cases for litigation and treatment by the system in general. While a country with fewer injuries is an inarguable good, of course, a reduced practice has practical implications for lawyers and agencies.
Often the message that jobs are being eliminated is delivered to workers’ compensation lawyer audiences with the provocative (and perhaps mischievous) suggestion that even our professional jobs in the field are on the way out. To me, such predictions recall the Saturday Night Live skit from 1977 where a priest, played by Dan Aykroyd, eliminated a key confessor task by having it automated via with the “Penance 1000” computer. See https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=saturday+night+live+penance+dan+akroyd&spf=1501273234428.) The provocateurs’ suggestion is, after all, that justice – like a holy sacrament – can at some point be administered without human involvement.
In any event, in a new Wall Street Journal article, the author, an artificial intelligence expert, portrays as exaggerated recent reports that score of workers will soon be jobless because of advances in the field. In his opinion, hype attends many of these analyses. As the subtitle of the article declares, “Smart machines will replace some jobs, but they will create many more.” Jerry Kaplan, Don’t Fear the Robots, The Wall Street Journal (July 22, 2017), available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-fear-the-robots-1500646623 (subscription required).
Kaplan asserts that the alarmists are ignoring the historical record. He notes, among other things, that 57% of the jobs under taken by workers in 1960 – e.g., office clerks, secretaries, gas pumpers, bowling alley pin-setters – no longer exist today. The alarmists recognize this phenomenon, but they argue, erroneously in his view, that the “coming wave of artificially intelligent computers and robots can do virtually any job that a human can do, so everyone’s job is on the chopping block.” Kaplan believes that this anxiety is nonsense. The core of his critique is that these innovations are simply the latest “wave of automation, and like previous waves, they reduce the need for human labor. In doing so, they make the remaining workers more productive and their companies more profitable. These profits then find their way into the pockets of employees, stockholders and consumers (through lower prices.)”
It is the extra money that is created through automation that will create new jobs. People will now have more money for vacations, apparel, eating out, going to concerts, and the like. This foreshadows, Kaplan asserts, “increased demand for flight attendants, hospitality workers, tour guides, bartenders, dog walkers, tailors, chefs, ushers, yoga instructors and masseuses, even as artificial intelligence reduces the need for drivers, warehouse workers and factory operators.” Kaplan concludes, “If history is a guide, this remarkable technology won’t spell the end of work as we know it. Instead, artificial intelligence will change the way we live and work, improving our standard of living while shuffling jobs from one category to another in the familiar capitalist cycle of creation and destruction.”