The world is going through a transformation. AI and automation are changing the workplace and taking safe, high-paying jobs. Anxious about losing meaningful work, many people feel lost.
OsloMet postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Schneider says we need to address the social and political implications of this transformation to maintain a safe and democratic world. To do that, he looks to history for lessons from another time of great transformation: the first Industrial Revolution.
Understanding life
One of the central questions of Schneider tries to answer as a social scientist is “how is life?”. As a historian, he focuses specifically on “how was life in the past?”.
In Schneider’s work to answer this question, he researches everything from which countries are wealthy or poor, to local and global politics, and even the development of scientific knowledge.
He doesn’t merely investigate which jobs were replaced or changed by technological shifts though, he wants to know about job quality and how it affected people living through that time.
The OsloMet researcher is interested in how technology changed work during the first Industrial Revolution. In Britain, Schneider’s main focus, this took place most between 1770 and 1850. Those changes, he says, have many parallels with what is happening now.
We are facing a world of tremendous change in work and labor markets. The Industrial Revolution was a previous time of technological change that might be a good analogue for the present and next 30 years.– Benjamin Schneider
A historical perspective
As technological progress charges forward, we can look to history to understand which levers we need to pull to make that transition as beneficial, or at least as painless, as possible.
Just as in the 18th and 19th centuries, today’s workers worry about the impact of technology on the workforce. Back then, the steam engine was the driving force, today it’s automation and AI. Schneider references a 2020 poll by the Institute for the Future of Work and Opinium which found that 42 percent of workers have already witnessed changes in their job due to technology within just the past year. Tech unemployment (or “labor displacement” as the economists call it) is now a regular conversation.
Of course, there is plenty of uncertainty around this transition. Economists suggest that automation and AI may lead to long-term unemployment across a range of professions. The challenge for historians like Schneider is to look to past examples to determine the fundamental characteristics of the technological change and how they interacted with economic and social conditions.
If he can find similar cases in the past, he can identify some of the causal mechanisms - worker skill levels, labor market institutions, and training. With these, he can predict the long-term effects of these technological shifts and suggest ways to avert the worst outcomes.
“Comparative research from a historical setting lets you look at the same technology in different places to see if it has the same effect,” he explains.
Parallels with the past
Drawing parallels with the Industrial Revolution offers valuable insights into navigating the current labor transition. Though the specific goals of automation today are somewhat different, the broad aims are the same.
The intent behind the first Industrial Revolution was to replace repetitive manual work with machinery and technology, ushering in longer and faster production processes powered by new sources of energy. Similarly, contemporary technological advancements, such as AI and automotive technologies, aim to replace repetitive cognitive tasks.
In both the past and present transitions, this automation causes initial labor displacement and the replacement of high-skill occupations with technology, leading to what economists call 'deskilling'. It’s not just manual labor tasks that are increasingly automated; Schneider points to the historical example like highly-skilled gunsmiths and weavers being replaced by semiskilled workers using specialized machine tools, and the contemporary example of knowledge workers like programmers and writers being replaced by AI-powered solutions.
Deciphering the records
One of the hardest things about being a historian is finding relevant records.
“We have to be careful to make sure that whatever historical example we're looking at has some validity in the present” says Schneider.
One challenge for Schneider and his colleagues is that proper labor surveys didn’t even start until the 1970s. To understand labor during the Industrial Revolution, he instead needs to look at proxies to get an understanding of what work was like during the industrial revolution - things like wage account books, diaries, and factory inspection records - to determine real wages and work hours.
One key thing Schneider and his colleagues are trying to construct from these subjective sources is how much autonomy people had over their work: Did people control their schedule? Did they control what tasks they performed? Did they feel safe and valued? and, perhaps most importantly, did they enjoy going to work?
Inequality then and now
Knowing how workers feel about the transition is important because it gets to the fundamental question of who benefits from technology.
“Technology can reduce the level of training needed for certain jobs and increase consumer purchasing power, but it could also increase inequality depending on who can claim the gains from these technological shifts.”
Schneider believes this applies not just to classic measures of inequality - like income and wealth - but also in other factors like autonomy in your job, occupational safety, and even your ability to work from home (the last of which was, perhaps surprisingly, more common than not pre-industrial revolution).
According to his research, who benefits from innovation depends a lot on who has power in the labor market. Historically and today, this is often people who already have money and power.
“A lot of the time it’s people who were in some kind of advantageous position before, people who had enough capital to invest in some technology, are the ones who really reap the benefits later because they had that initial opportunity.”
These inequalities have historically been mitigated by the strength of a country’s labor movements and social welfare systems, whether it is easy for people to retrain to a new job, and if we can accurately predict the right job to retrain into.
During technological shifts, workers’ career trajectories can be very different depending on whether they have more or less power in the labor market.– Benjamin Schneider
Schneider sees this as the main lesson that may be transferable from the past to the present or future.
Worries and hope
If these inequalities are not addressed, Schneider imagines a world in which automation replaces most middle skill jobs without replacing them with good quality work. This has implications for people’s objective and subjective well-being.
“If people are displaced from the work that gives them meaning in life by automation, there are potentially very significant negative effects for how we how we feel about our lives.”
Schneider warns that these negative effects include not just reduced income and occupational safety, but political polarization and the rise of populist movements.
On the other hand, Schneider points out that we should be cautiously optimistic about technology. The increased productivity that technological change brought about is the main reason that we have a better quality of life than 200 years ago. In general, Schneider says, we are much better off than during the Industrial Revolution.
“People live longer, we're healthier, we have more opportunities to learn and experience more of the world than people generally did in the past.”
If we can use technology to automate the worst jobs and support the people who were doing those jobs to find something that's more fulfilling to them, Schneider believes we can achieve this utopian dream of the future of work.
“Automate the drudgery and the dangerous work and give people the opportunity to choose to work less and do more activities that we think are valuable with our own time.”
Schneider’s job as a historian is to figure out which levers to pull to put us on the path to that future.
Further reading
Nikolova, M., Lepinteur, A., & Cnossen, F. (2023). Just Another Cog in the Machine? A Worker-Level View of Robotization and Tasks (IZA DP No. 16610) (iza.org).
Center for Research on Pandemics and Society (PANSOC)
