Every morning around 0600 as I take my morning walk, I pass the morning round of delivery vehicles.
They come in two types. The first is the large, blocky van associated with the world's biggest online retailer, complete with beeping noise when parked and the high beam incandescents indicating an electric vehicle, their drivers in the blue and grey uniform. The other are the personal transports - cars, trucks - with the driver that may or may not wear a safety vest clearly delineating themselves as a delivery person, single package grasped in hand.
The same two groups will appear in the evenings as I make dinner: added to these two groups are a third group, personal cars whose drivers are not safety vest clothed but are carrying boxes and bags of what are clearly food to doorways.
Even 5 years ago this was not a thing. Now, it is as regular an occurrence as street lights going on and off.
---
My work, along with likely hundreds (or even thousands) of other companies, is heavily pushing Artificial Intelligence (or AI). When I say "heavily pushing", I mean a multi-week mandatory training regime to be done by the entire company. Progress is tracked. Levels of in-person engagement are expected.
The point of all of this is to bring Artificial Intelligence into our daily work. The anticipated outcome is that we will all begin to use Artificial Intelligence to automate simple (or not so simple tasks) and create tools that allow us to focus our time on higher level activities (what these "higher level activities" are never clearly defined except in generic sorts of examples). I am assuming that, for next year's goals, some level of Artificial Intelligence will be included: demonstrating using it in practical terms, creating a tool, automating tasks.
It was only in one of the later trainings that it was noted that those who learn to "adapt" will be the most successful in the new work place.
---
The point of this discourse is not to argue the benefits or lack thereof for Artificial Intelligence; people far more educated and thoughtful are commenting on it. My particular point is dwelling on what I see as two opposite points: On one, an intensely manual process that has virtually no barriers to entry except the ability to drive and follow instructions on a phone; on the other, a process where automation is being heavily pushed as a way to make work more efficient.
That industries and companies will oversell the benefits of Artificial Intelligence goes without question in my mind: if history has demonstrated anything, it is that companies will triple down on anything that promises to save money regardless of the long term ability of said thing to save money or even work effectively. They will the initial results that they think they will get; the long term impacts - such as, for example, Artificial Intelligence not being the panacea for ever task - will manifest itself only after the people have been fired and the systems changed to accommodate Artificial Intelligence.
More importantly, what happens to the people who did those jobs?
---
I cannot guess at the reasons people take delivery jobs. For some, it is likely the job they can get. For others, it is one of many they can use to piece together an income. But in either case, these jobs are predicated on an underlying principle: people have money to spend that allows them to buy things that include the overhead for delivery.
In an economy which is in distress - be it from a collapse in markets or a mass series of layoffs - the first thing to go for many is non-essential spending. Spending will concentrate down further and further into the basics - housing, food, the basics of living. And with that spending drop, goes all sorts of other jobs.
It strikes me that I am looking at an economic system that is eating itself from both ends, both the highly paid and technical side and the low end minimum wage side. What emerges from that I can scarcely imagine - except I cannot imagine it will be good.
Interestingly, fresh college graduates I worked with “never have any money” and yet order door dash for lunch. No packing their lunch and no driving the short distance to get their own food to save money. For some reason, those didn’t seem like options to them; we are salaried employees so it’s not as though clocking out would result in less pay. Very little motivation to pinch pennies in most of the recent college grads I’ve met.
ReplyDelete