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Towards the care economy

Jan 2001

Increasing automation will gradually make people more productive, reducing the manpower required, and making some people redundant. In the short term, this is tolerable since new jobs are being created by new industries and services which means a shift towards and information economy. However, as machine intelligence gradually increases and applications and services more sophisticated, increasing numbers of knowledge workers and other information workers will also lose their jobs. Agencies and middlemen first, information gatherers and analysts and value adders later. Finally, information creators will also suffer from substitution. Many of the professions throughout these levels are vulnerable to massive substitution by machine intelligence. Thus, jobs which require knowledge, creativity, decision making or other intellectual skills, or almost any manufacturing or manual job, are liable to disappear.

Only jobs where people are an essential component of the service, such as caring and personal services are really safe (even here, some parts of the job which are intellectual are open to substitution). Many of the new jobs being created now or in the near future are transient. Jobs such as counselling, raising children, waiting in restaurants, hairdressing etc are good examples of jobs where substitution is unlikely for the foreseeable future. Some low paid jobs also may be uneconomic to automate, such as street cleaning.

As a result of this trend, there will come a point where increasing automation will benefit the firm but cost the country a greater amount. At this point at the latest, capitalism will have peaked and will begin to decline.

The obvious result of this long-term trend is a shift of value in jobs away from knowledge or skill, towards caring roles where workers are valued because they are people and their output is basically human interaction. Differentiators are then personality, warmth etc, rather than efficiency. We may call this the care economy. It is interesting indeed that many such jobs today are valued much less than the intellectual professions. Nevertheless, intellect seems easier for computers to learn than supposedly more simple human interaction skills.

It is also interesting that this economy will have very different demographic characteristics. While there is currently a premium on the energy, fast thinking and creativity associated with youth, the skills that may become most valued are those we tend to think of as wisdom, life experience and basic human warmth. Older people will find that they are no longer at a disadvantage.