Jean-François Stich

Pessimistic views on technological progress claim that our current jobs will ultimately be taken over by machines. Somehow, I believe it. But I do not believe that we will be made obsolete in the process. In fact, we do not even have to get fired and replaced by machines.

The recruitment process is a trade. Both recruiters and candidates show what they have to offer and then negotiate. We already trade our minds and labour. Soon, we may even put in the balance our own devices. A popular IT trend these days is called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Employees bring their own personal devices to the workplace and use them to work. How long before recruiters start asking: “which devices and software could you bring to our company?” They will then expect these devices to be adapted to the job description. They will also expect candidates to be already fluent with their own devices. Employees become “augmented” by the machines they bring and which make them more productive.

From this prospect I derive what I call Bring Your Own Worker (BYOW). Work-life balance is a concern for many employees. Some wish to work part-time or telecommute. If given the chance, some would even wish to not work at all. Many political parties also advocate reduced working hours and shared jobs. Let’s suppose one finds an interesting job offer but can do or wants to do only half of it. Fortunately, someone else can do the exact other half. However, it is unlikely that the recruiter will agree willingly to hire both workers part time if someone else – or something else – can do the whole job. Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-hour work week, came with a clever but highly questionable alternative. He suggested that we automate and outsource most of our job tasks to low-paid assistants in developing countries so we do not have to show up at work anymore… The idea here is that employees can accomplish their individual work the way they want. They can do so by hiring their own team at their expenses or bringing their own devices or tools of the trade.

Now let’s go even further in time to the point at which robots will do our work better than we do. Pessimistic futurists suggest that at that time, organisations will just replace all their employees by robots. A society of “workers without work, that is, deprived of the only activity left for them”, as said Hannah Arendt. Yet there is a large variety of individual jobs to replace, and thus a large variety of robots to design. With Bring Your Own Worker, I suggest that employees remain in control of labour. They design, create, or purchase their own robotic workers with precise features meeting a specific business need or personal aspiration. An architecture enthusiast may just build or acquire a robot architect and introduce it to the job market as a candidate. The employed robots earn salaries for their owners and working hours apply to both workers and their robots taken together. This is different than selling a software or being a contractor. This is not about outsourcing an operation but outsourcing a whole single job, the one being applied for.

Even if this prospect seems brighter than the mass unemployment advocated by pessimistic futurists, it is still frightening somehow. The least computer literate among us will wonder: “what if I do not know how to code and to create my own team of robotic workers? What if I cannot make the initial financial investment? Will I be obsolete?” It is too soon to answer these questions. At the time machines take over all of our jobs, maybe everyone will already possess one’s own robot or replica. Or, by then, coding might be a common skill and robot engineering might be as easy as printing. In Program or be Programmed, Douglas Rushkoff claims that the fate of coding will be similar to the one writing had. Before becoming a common skill learnt at school, writing was an elite skill mastered by a lucky few.

In The Time Machine, H. G. Wells introduced two post-human races. The Eloi do not work anymore but enjoy a life of passive leisure. Labour is no longer a means to survive. Their paradise is entirely dependent on machines being maintained underground by hard-working creatures, the Morlocks. The traditional optimistic views on technological progress are suggesting that when robots take over our jobs, we will have the leisure to do more interesting activities or even none. Yet some Morlocks will still have to maintain the robots for Eloi to be relieved. I find this prospect dreadful. First, John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that technology will allow a 15-hour work week by the 21st century. Except it did not. Technology took over our jobs and forced us to create new ones, some being much less meaningful. Second, what if we do enjoy the work machines will steal us and do not want to do another one? What if we lose something fundamental in the process of handing it over to machines and Morlocks? In this prospect also, “the machine works and forces the man to co-operate”, as Oswald Spengler once wrote. BYOW is the opposite. It is about keeping our jobs, continuing to work and forcing machines to co-operate. Humans remain experts in their fields, choose their own career orientation, but have to acquire side knowledge about coding or robotics. They are both Eloi and Morlocks. They forge their own tools of the trade and decide their work-life balance.