Is creative destruction a boon for better service?
3 min read
As new research shows that new technologies create more jobs than they destroy, Lord Borwick muses on more leisure time in future, and more leisure work.
In 1589 the inventor William Lee applied for a patent on a new knitting machine that could quickly produce far higher quality stockings than could be done by hand. Elizabeth I denied him his patent. In doing so, she said:
“Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”
So concerns about the impact of technology on jobs are by no means a new thing; even our Monarchs have been worried. We also know that the Luddites took to destroying the machinery that they thought would take away jobs.
The current debate on this issue can be equally pessimistic. Perhaps that’s understandable: it’s far easier to show how many jobs a machine can take away from humans than it is to say how many it could create, either directly or indirectly.
But economists at Deloitte have shown that technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed in the last 144 years. In Technology and people: the great jobs creating machine, we see reasons to be optimistic – while some jobs are undoubtedly taken away by technological advances, it simply changes the types of jobs that people do. For instance, while the number of manual jobs may fall, this allows people more leisure time – and more leisure time means more people working in the leisure industries. Think of personal trainers at gyms, or baristas in coffee bars.
In 1871, agriculture employed 6.6% of the workforce of England and Wales. Today it employs just 0.2% of the workforce, which is a huge 95% decline.
Innovation and new technology has taken people out of the jobs that traditionally required ‘muscle power’. And at the same time, we have of course increased output and efficiency in food production.
At it’s not just jobs requiring muscle power. I was recently in Japan, where a new hotel is exclusively using robots as receptionists. The hotelier clearly believes that the vast majority of requests can be predicted and dealt with by a robot. The fact that the robot is dressed – if that is the right word – as a velociraptor in a pinafore and a hat either makes the point that the level of this technology is emerging from the evolutionary swamp, or reflects the weird sense of fun of Japanese designers.
But while that means fewer receptionists in the hotel, it means more engineers making the robots, or technicians to maintain them.
This got me thinking: if the drudgery of routine tasks is removed from the service industry, then perhaps there will be spare capacity to improve good service to people who don’t often get it?
A valuable new award, sponsored by Bespoke Hotels, is to be launched this Thursday, for the best improvements in design for disabled access to hotels. If clever people have more time on their hands to carry out tasks like this, then that will be one of many benefits of the rise of the machines.
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