The term creative destruction is thrown around a lot to explain why people have just lost their jobs. Its the nasty, grinding, engine of future wealth. Its the punch to the face now that pays off in five years. Its the economys version of a hyena, eating the weak and sickly and fertilizing the savannah with their processed remains.
Creative destruction is when new techniques of doing business replace old ones, while using fewer resources. For resources substitute jobs, in most cases.
In the long run, this is good. When my grandfathers family immigrated to Canada a century ago, more than half of all Canadians lived on farms. Now its a fraction of our total population. Weve gone from a man plodding behind a plough horse, hoping the bank doesnt foreclose, to a farmer sitting atop a massive tractor, using satellite weather data and checking the commodities markets on his smartphone.
The downside of this was the exodus of people from farms as they realized that they couldnt make a go of things. They washed up in cities, and found other jobs, in time. Most of them. The same thing has been going on with logging and manufacturing and a host of other industries, ever since Thomas Newcomen realized he could use a steam engine to do something useful, 300 years ago.
Every wave of the creative destruction of an industry will kill some people. Theyll find themselves jobless, theyll drink or turn to drugs, or theyll eat a gun, or theyll just turn their face to the wall and die inside.
We cant stop the future, but we should remember that it has casualties.
I bring this up because there are some jobs that appear to be on the brink right now.
This month, Nevada became the first U.S. state to create regulations for computer-controlled cars. This is not some pie-in-the-sky dream. Google has a small fleet of computer-driven prototypes that it has been road-testing all over the United States for the past couple of years. Other companies are also building their own models. All those self-parking luxury cars were testbeds for much of the technology, as were the DARPA challenges of the past decade.
So if youre a young person thinking about getting a job as a taxi driver or long haul trucker, you might want to reconsider. Those jobs will still be around in five years. But in 10? Or 15?
No one really saw this coming. The self-driving robot car has been a joke bit of futurism for years, like video-phones (Hi, Skype!) and and jetpacks. Even those DARPA challenge winners were slow and bulky and not that spry, compared to human drivers. But five years later, cars can drive themselves. Its all down to working out the bugs now.
And frankly, after were done panicking, things will be better. No more drunk drivers. No more truckers drifting off after too many hours behind the wheel.
Whats next? Well, you may have noticed that your clothes cost money. This is because they have to be sewn by actual people. The technology to actually tailor clothing hasnt changed much in about a century.
There are projects afoot in Europe to mechanize the process. Then theres home building, another hugely labour-intensive industry thats being attacked from one side by modular house construction, pre-made trusses and walls, and from the other by truly insane plans to build houses with robot arms squirting concrete like giant inkjet printers.
After driving, I have no predictions which jobs will go next. But it will be something, and it will be sooner than we expect.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter for one of the News sister papers, the Langley Advance.
