Technology and People: Deloitte Report
Debate between Lord Borwick and Lord Taylor of Holbeach
Lord Borwick
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of Deloitte’s report Technology and people: The great job-creating machine published in August.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
My Lords, as we move on to the dinner hour debate, it might help noble Lords to know that the time available has been extended to 90 minutes. Therefore, the advisory speaking time has been extended to six minutes.
Lord Borwick (Con)
My Lords, in 1589 the inventor William Lee applied for a patent on a new knitting machine that could quickly produce far higher quality stockings than could be made by hand. Elizabeth I denied him his patent. In doing so she said:
“Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars”.
Does my noble friend the Minister have any record of the advice given by her department to the monarch in this case? We know that not long after that, Britain became a world leader in textiles, despite the Luddites and their alleged destruction of the machinery they thought was threatening their jobs These concerns have never subsided. In the 1930s, many predicted an endless depression as jobs were lost to machines. In the 1970s, unions were concerned about mass unemployment as factories became more efficient.
So concerns about the impact of technology on jobs are by no means a new thing, and, as in the 16th century, whenever we hear about the impact of technology on the jobs market these days, it is almost always negative. The headlines are terrifying: robots will take your job and industry will cull thousands of employees to make way for cheaper machines. It is straightforward to show how many jobs a machine can take away from humans. The minus side of the ledger is quite clear—but what about the plus side? That is much harder to measure, which perhaps underpins the negativity of the current debate. It is also much harder for journalists to write about the plus side.
But some excellent analysis has been produced by economists at Deloitte that shows that technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed in the last 144 years. That was the key finding from the report that moved me to table this debate: Technology and People: The Great Job-creating Machine. I am grateful to the team who produced the report as, along with several other noble Lords, I have met with them several times to discuss this issue in more depth.
As the economists at Deloitte found, new technology simply changes the types of jobs that people do. Agriculture is a key example. In 1871 it employed 6.6% of the workforce in England and Wales. Today it employs just 0.2% of the workforce, which is a decline of a massive 95%. It is good that we do not have as many people working in this sector, and we produce more food as a result of technology changes.
In general terms, technological innovation has taken people out of manual work: jobs that decades and centuries ago required muscle power. So while employment in agriculture has declined, it has grown in other areas. Let us take nursing and care. Just 1.1% of the workforce was employed in the caring professions in 1871, while in 2011 these professions employed almost a quarter of the England and Wales workforce. That is a huge leap, indicating that as we need less heavy lifting, we can redirect efforts to other areas.
Technology has also boosted employment in knowledge-intensive sectors. Again, since we do not have to engage in intense physical activity to produce food, energy and goods, we can instead engage in jobs that require more brainpower. That explains why employment has grown in medicine and professional services. And despite the invention of calculators and computers, the number of accountants in England and Wales has grown from around 10,000 in 1871 to 216,000 now. Indeed, it has been reported that the UK has more accountants than the rest of the EU combined. This indicates that even when a new technology seemingly threatens a job, it does not necessarily play out as the pessimists think it will—and, given the Conservatives’ strong record on jobs over the last two Parliaments, we have even more reason to be optimistic.
I spent some of the days of the Easter Recess in Japan, where the level of service is magnificent. I was particularly intrigued by the hotel I stayed in. Some of the reception desks were normal—high tops, with the receptionists standing to talk to guests. Others had 1 ow desks—in which case the receptionist had been trained to leap to her feet whenever a guest approached. A wonderful article in “Wired” magazine describes in detail a new hotel near Tokyo Disneyland, in which most of the receptionists—and indeed other staff—are automatons. The hotelier clearly believes that the vast majority of requests can be predicted and dealt with by a robot. The fact that the robot is dressed, if that is the right word, as a velociraptor in a pinafore and a hat either makes the point that the level of this technology is emerging from the evolutionary swamp or reflects the weird sense of fun of the Japanese designers. What is the impact of automated receptionists? It has now created the need for more staff, not fewer. Perhaps there is one fewer receptionist, but there are more engineers, programmers—and possibly psychiatrists to help the bemused patrons. It is not of course the hotelier’s objective to create other jobs elsewhere, but that is of course the great thing about innovation.
If we think about the receptionists in Japan, their training should be in how to solve new problems, not just about how to stand and smile at the customers: how to think, not just how to behave. Perhaps the reptilian robotic receptionist is an extreme example of a general trend that many jobs are a mixture of drudgery and interest, and the truth is that many people have no real challenge in their jobs. Many noble Lords have earned their living in manual labour at some stage in the past. As a 17 year-old, I was an ineptly skilled bricklayer, hating the cold rain in Scotland in January and hoping for a better job. I am rather glad that I got one.
Noble Lords will know that a repetitive job is rarely fulfilling, as they are used to dealing with challenges. It cannot be the summit of human achievement to assemble widgets, working like Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times”, driven by an ever-accelerating production line. The people doing a task repetitively may actually be dreaming about different mental problems: how to motivate their teenagers or what they would do if they won the lottery. We should be encouraging people to use their brainpower rather than lose it. Not using reasoning is very bad for the health of human beings.
Jobs that are examined on television series are the ones that have drama and factors out of the control of the individual. The brave fishermen catching crabs in “The Deadliest Catch” or the brave souls in “Ice Road Truckers” are filmed not because they are photogenic but because they are mostly triumphant over high odds. There is a certain romance in these jobs which we can watch from afar in a warm living-room. The cold and the wet, and the danger that could kill them, is real, but it is also dramatised to allow people to enjoy the programme in comfort that little bit more—although perhaps the biggest danger is most noticeable to the poor cameraman on the fishing boat for the first time rather than to the fishermen themselves. They may be our modern working heroes: the last ones to have their jobs automated because their environment is so uncontrolled. Perhaps soon we shall have autonomous fishing vehicles trundling around the sea-floor, meaning that the humans who now do this job will be able to do something safer.
The political enthusiasm for the coal miners belied the fact that it was a dirty, dangerous profession. In 2013, there were 260,000 deaths worldwide from pneumoconiosis, or black lung, most of which was the result of exposure to particles while deep mining. More than £4 billion has been paid in compensation to miners for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and vibration white finger. So is it a tragedy that a deep mine shuts or is it a triumph that we no longer produce crippled and chronically diseased working men? History has shown us a stream of jobs that have disappeared, from lamplighters to village blacksmiths, from threshers to coal hauliers, and most of these jobs were dangerous and uncomfortable.
The BBC website hosts a search tool where you type in your job and it tells you the extent to which it is at risk from automation. The jobs most at risk are repetitive, clerical and administrative. Perhaps if our new laws have too many clauses, legislators are doomed to be replaced by robots as well.
If there is anything we can do to prepare ourselves for the rise of the robots, it is to ensure that we have an education system that is teaching the right skills, but one that is also flexible and differentiated. The cleverest should be able to take advantage of their cleverness in whatever field they may be, rather than be consumed by the blob. After all, William Lee, the inventor of that knitting machine rejected by the Elizabeth I, attended Cambridge on a form of scholarship. His cleverness was recognised and nurtured in the education system, even though the Queen was not impressed. It is great education that can solve the problems raised by technology.