Two years ago a CAD software producer ran an ad campaign with a provocative question: “With over 1 million people in the world able to do your job, what makes you so special?”  The campaign showed how their product could be part of the answer to that question.

The question is provocative because we are in the midst of a revolution in the world economy.   The revolution is similar in magnitude to the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture or from agriculture to industry.  The current revolution is in automation and globalization.  Now that we have the technology to make it possible, there’s no turning back.

NPR Marketplace ran a segment last Thursday on factory automation.  “This is manufacturing’s new night shift,” the reporter says, “No workers required.”  The reporter then interviewed the owner of a highly automated factory.  When the issue of jobs came up, the factory owner quickly said foreign trade has had more of an impact on jobs.

I suspect automation will change the nature of jobs more than trade, but that debate is purely academic.  We’re not going to undo automation or trade, so which is ending more jobs is a moot point.  We have a more emotional connection looking at a human being who does a job we used to do than we do looking at a automated point of sale station at the supermarket or at a new CAD software that allows a designer to do more boards per unit time, but the result from a jobs standpoint is the same.

By chance I was finishing reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin the same week Marketplace ran the segment on automation.  Linchpin asserts that until a decade ago most jobs were part of the industrial or “factory” model.  This means factory owners put up the capital for the business itself and work out systems that make the workers into replaceable cogs in the machine.  In exchange for this, the factory owners offered workers good money, benefits, and job security.  (“Factory” jobs in Godin’s definition include any systematized operation, like call centers and insurance offices, not just manufacturing.)  In Godin’s view, this was often a good deal for workers and owners.  Automation and globalization are tearing this deal apart.  Now any job function that can be simplified into obeying procedures will be done either by machines or done by the cheapest label possible.

The positive side of this is that technology is making means of production available to more people.  Everyone who has access to computers can publish their music, software, commentary, video, etc almost for free.  It’s easy to own your own mini-factory.  The key is working out creative ways to help people and solve problems.  This takes a willingness to make waves, make mistakes, and do things that appear weird at first-- the exact opposite of what workers need to do to thrive in a factory environment.

Karl Marx was right that capitalism would not fairly distribute wealth produced by industry to those who do the work.  He suggested abolishing capitalism.  Instead we see labor-based industry being supplanted as the primary engine of production.  This opens an avenue to solving the problems, apart from the old solutions of leftist revolutions or hoping ever-growing production would eventually help even the poorest people.

The changes will be extremely tricky to manage.  Globalization means we could end up with increasing pockets of the developing world appearing in wealthy cities and countries.  No one has a complete solution to manage these changes, but it’s not possible or desirable to go back in time to the post-WWII era.

Going forward engineers will have to answer constantly the question “What makes you so special?”  The recession of 09-10 did not cause this condition.  The end of the recession hasn’t ended it.  It’s a fundamental change.  This makes life less stable and predictable, but it makes us push ourselves to do things we never would have imagined in an era of stable job markets.