The Pandemic and Automation: Where Are We Now?

In the years preceding the pandemic there was enormous hype about automation, particularly in the wake of the 2013 Frey-Osborne study The Future of Employment . Following the pandemic the effort was supposedly in overdrive.

However, a close reading of even the few items about the matter that serve up actual examples of such automation (like the installation of a voice recognition-equipped system for receiving customers' orders as they pass through some fast food outlet's drive-thru lane) reveals that they are clearer on intentions and possibilities than actual developments--like polls telling us that "50% of employers are expecting to accelerate the automation of some roles in their companies" (never mind how much employment those employers account for, or how serious their expectations are, or what "accelerate" and "some" actually mean here). Meanwhile rather more prominent when we look at discussion of actualities rather than possibilities we find ourselves reading about the discontents of the humans. We read of how workers in jobs that have them dealing with the general public face-to-face are burned-out and fed-up, not of how bosses are replacing those workers with new devices--a decade after robot waiters and the like were supposed to be on the verge of becoming commonplace. We read that industrial robot orders are up--but (as, perhaps, we note that the actual number of robots ordered is not really so staggering) we read far more of supposed "labor shortages" than we do of automation filling in the gaps. We also know that, as seen from the standpoint of the whole economy, productive investment--without which no one is automating anything--remains depressed compared with what it was pre-crisis (and remember, the world never really got over that Great Recession), while it also does not seem terribly likely to get much better very soon, with that media darling and icon of techno-hype Elon Musk, even as he promises a humanoid Teslabot by September, publicly raving about recession just around the corner and preemptively slashing his work force in anticipation, not in the expectation of employing fewer humans, just fewer humans with actual salaries (while those Teslabots do not seem to be part of the story, go figure).

Why do we see such a disparity between the expectations and the reality? A major reason, I think, is that those who vaguely anticipated some colossal rush to automate the economy imagined vast numbers of ready, or nearly ready, systems ready to do the job--a natural result of the press tending to imagine that "innovations" at Technology Readiness Level 1 are actually on Level 9, with the truth coming out when push comes to shove, as it so clearly has amid the crisis, the requisite means are not nearly so far along as some would have had us believe. Those observers also underestimated, just as government and the media have generally done, just how disruptive the pandemic was to be--how long the pandemic and its direct disruptions would last, to say nothing of the indirect, and how much all this would matter. In line with the familiar prejudices of the media lockdowns, strikes and the war in Ukraine get plenty of time and space as sources of economic troubles--but critics of central bank monetary policies get very, very little, with one result that the upsurge in inflation took so many "experts" by surprise. And that inflation, and the tightening of credit that has inevitably followed it, however belated and gradual compared with the talk of latterday Volcker shock it may be, are hardly the kind of thing that encourages investors. Nor are the unceasing supply chain problems. (If the country can't even keep itself in baby formula, how can it keep itself in the inputs required for a drastic expansion of revolutionary automation?) The result is that those of us watching this scene would do well to take those reports of some drastic increase in the rate of automation with a measure of skepticism.