The Rabbits and the Foxes
With reference to the plot below.
Before the industrial revolution over 90% of people in the West were employed in agriculture.
After the industrial revolution, productivity in the agricultural sector improved and people increasingly shifted to employment in factories because they weren’t required on the land.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy; factories needed people to run and they also needed all those people to have jobs so they could consume the work product.
But eventually technological unemployment caught up with the factories. As productivity improved, labour, the unreliable and expensive input into manufacturing, was slowly made redundant after the 1950s.
Then, with nowhere else to go, the workforce started shifting increasingly to the services.
The services sector can be thought of in many ways;
1. As people serving people or people serving business. A taxi driver versus an IT administrator in a large corporation, for example.
2. As people employed in improving business efficiency, or as people employed in artificially constructed jobs with no economic benefit other than the employment of the service provider. For example, the same IT administrator in a large corporation versus someone employed in an ephemeral NGO or a spiritual guidance guru.
3. As people employed in incumbent services or people employed in creating new services. An extreme case study would be the taxi driver again versus the CEO of Uber.
Where I’m going with this is that the services sector needs to be broken up into more useful sub-segments.
There’s not much point having a sector of the workforce that supposedly accounts for over 70% of the population in an artificially uniform slab.
With three categories of services, as listed above, each with two options, my way of looking at the services results in 8 sub-segments.
That’s too many to be useful and in any case, the categories aren’t really binary. On each measure any specific job could be anywhere on the three dimensions. Visually, that’d be one of those useless spider web plots.
But of these 8 sub-segments some have already peaked in employment and are falling victim to disintermediation and ever improving productivity.
For example, the ticket selling job at the train station that is no longer required due to the newly introduced universal ticketing system. Or the call phone operator role that has been replaced by a computer generated voice system. The enterprise software systems support engineer made redundant by cloud services. The Uber driver who will no longer be required as autonomous vehicles become a reality.
My guess is that the current IT era will eventually be seen as a turning point where, around the start of the 21st century, two sub-segments of the services increasingly absorbed most of the people.
Driven by competitive forces, businesses will do everything possible to reduce their collective services workforce.
So I expect to see most people finding roles serving other people in ever more artificially created jobs.
At the same time, employment in larger companies or large government enterprises will give way to employment via consulting and in SMEs.
These jobs are in what I call the “Rabbits” Services Sector.
These will become incumbent roles that are not immediately replaceable by machines because of government legislation, or because of the whims of the human customers, or due to the scope of the technical challenge.
There will be a second group, the “Foxes” Services Sector, composed of a smaller number of people employed in business strategy and management.
Ironically the focus of this sector will be on accelerating this polarization of the workforce through the development of ever accelerating disintermediation and automation technologies.
When the Foxes can also be replaced by machines we’ll be living in some sort of Asimov novel.
It occurs to me that modern schooling is mostly to do with preparing kids for a life with the Rabbits. It all adds up. Unquestioning and harmless participation in both the workforce and the community is coached. Hard.
A school for the Foxes would be so much more fun. But its probably not needed. Oh well.
Philosophy will become redundant. We already know what we’re doing here on this planet. Surviving with the minimum amount of pain and for the maximum amount of time.
42 my arse!
offshore westerly 