What do you do when asked to automate away other peoples' jobs?
At work there's a project that was originally pitched as an automated system we would build for a new client, and now the conversation has shifted towards automating away some data entry tasks for an existing client. If the project is successful I would guess that some or all of the people doing the data entry tasks would be out of a job. And if it's a resounding success I would guess that the powers that be would be eager to apply it in other areas and potentially put more people out of jobs.
This project is in the very early stages of gathering requirements and whatnot so it's not really clear what exactly we're building or what my role in building it would be. But it involves a technology that's new to us (natural language processing) and often times I end up playing some role in a project that involves learning something new, even if it's just in some small way.
So yeah, I know automation replacing low-skill work is nothing new and if these jobs can be automated away, they will be sooner or later, but this is the first time I've been confronted with the idea of using my skills to put people I don't know out of a job and it sticks in my craw. Normally I love automation and interacting with new (to me) tech even if it's nothing groundbreaking and I'm just doing the plumbing to connect system A to interface B, but in the past it's always been in the name of freeing up people from tedious tasks so that they can do more interesting and more important work, rather than "freeing" them of their paycheck. So I'm finding myself adding this to the small but compelling pile of frustrations I have with this job and weighing it against the also-small but also-compelling pile of things I love about it.
Anyway, if you've ever been in a position where you were asked to automate away someone else's job, how did that go? What did you do?
If you haven't, what do you think you would do?
Data entry sucks. The sooner that can be automated the better. They might lose their jobs in the short term, but you're improving society as a whole in the long term. Especially if this is what causes those employees to learn new, better skills and then start applying them elsewhere.
The vast majority of my working life has been spent automating people out of jobs. Now I spend most of my life teaching others to automate even more people out of even jobs, and researching how to automate more and more things more completely (compsci and engineering).
It comes down to an inverse of the broken window fallacy - there is no inherent value in work. Work only holds value when it is required to be done, and if it can be automated then it doesn't need to be done (it is the same as fixing a broken window).
Now, there is the obvious issue of today's society being work for its own sake driven, and the horrifyingly inequitable distribution of the benefits of automation. That is a far bigger question that I spend time on, but more in the form of political activism and infecting all those malleable minds I get access to with my weird economically lefty ideas. I highly recommend https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/boringdystopia/.
Try this thought experiment: imagine you are hired to destroy all the computers in a company. Now they need more people to do the same work. Do you think that is a good thing to do?