Richard Baldwin’s latest book, The Globotics Revolution, is a terrific primer on two trends promising to disrupt the world of middle class work in the rich economies. One is competition from ‘Remote Intelligence’ or in other words a tidal wave of talent in countries such as China and India increasingly well able to compete with better-paid professionals in the OECD. The other is comptition from AI, increasingly well able to compete with etc etc. Combine more globalisation and robotics and you get the ‘globotics’ of the title (a terrible word, but never mind). The book argues that the combination is something new and significant in scale, more than just a bit more of existing trends.
The bulk of the book considers each of the two elements in turn, providing excellent, accessible summaries of the economic research and the projections of the likely impact on work. Some of the forces identified may not manifest as fast as expected – the spread of autonomous vehicles, for instance. The book is also more gung-ho about the continuation of Moore’s Law than many others who pay close attention to the computer industry.
I’m also a little sceptical about the extent to which remote workers will substitute for highly paid professionals, mainly because there is something separately valuable in the know how and experience gained from face to face contact in specific places. With hindsight, it was a mistake for so much manufacturing to be offshored because of loss of engineering know how (see for example this great article by Gregory Tassey); this will be truer in services. Mancur Olson’s point in Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk – that an immigrant to a rich country from a poor one becomes more productive overnight because of the social and physical capital around them in their new environment – applies.
Even so, the bottom line is that job disruption at the lesser and slower end of the range of possibilities will still have a profound impact on people’s livelihoods. We should be getting prepared. Baldwin argues that there is no mystery about the policies needed. He argues for Denmark-style flexicurity, with ease of being fired compensated by significant transitional funding and training – or even for slowing down the pace of change by making it harder to fire people (despite the evidence this contributes to high unemployment rates). With the need to prepare – and to implement far more effective policies than was the case in the earlier phases of deindustrialisation and automation – it’s surely impossible to disagree.
The book ends on an oddly positive note, given the jobs-ocalypse it predicts: “I am optimistic about the long run.” In the very long term it forsees an economy where the things machines (and I guess offshore workers) cannot do: more local, more human and more prosperous (thanks, robots!) society. “Our work lives will be filled with far more caring, sharing, understanding, creating, empathizing, innovating and managing …. The sense of belonging to a community will rise and people will support each other.” This is wonderfully upbeat, a world where machines do all the drudge work and humans brew craft beer and care for each other. It’s hard to see how to get there from today’s fractious world where the absence of a sense of community is pretty manifest in many places and only the few can afford the craft beer. I hope he’s right, though.
Agree with the book’s rosy long-term vision or not, it’s a thorough introduction to the economic debates about globalization and automation, and the forces that are going to change our world in the next few decades, populist backlask or no.
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