What technology does to expertise

My car broke down. Just a flat battery needing a jump start. The mobile mechanic connected a device to the battery and an app on his phone showed that the battery needs to be replaced. A few years ago a mechanic might have used a multimeter to measure the charge and used their expertise to interpret the results. Today, the expertise for understanding the battery is with the device and its developers. The mechanic no longer needs that expertise.

Technology shifts expertise.

Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, from University of Oxford, study the future of work and machine learning. They suggested that those jobs involving routine work are likely to be substituted with automation technologies. This is technology shifting the expertise that used to be required to do a job away from those that do the work. Fixing car batteries is just one of those jobs.

The shift occurs within organisations as well as across entire economies. Communication used to take large typing pools writing the same memo on lots pieces of paper to send across the company. Today, it takes a few highly skilled people to maintain the systems that allow anyone to type an email and communicate with millions of people. This expertise shift shows as technology increasingly replaces medium skilled work, and people are pushed towards either low skilled work or highly skilled work.

These two extremes are what Goos and Mannings, a research assistant and professor at the London School of Economics, called ‘lousy jobs’ and ‘lovely jobs’. ‘Lovely jobs’ are those that require creative thinking and the ability to confront novel situations successfully. Automation will complement those lovely jobs in “performing non-routine problem solving and complex communications tasks” but is unlikely to replace them. ‘Lousy jobs’ are those that aren’t worth automating because they can be done cheaply by all those low skilled workers. A machine can diagnose a battery, and maybe one day drive the van, but opening the bonnet and attaching the device might need a human in loop for a while yet.

But, as technology progresses, and becomes more advanced, the expertise shift increases. The higher skilled workers become fewer as the work becomes more specialised. The lower skilled workers become more as the routine work that isn’t easy to automate is all that is left. This is a power law distribution of wages and worker numbers. It’s how a relative change in fewer highly specialised people commanding higher wages results in a proportional change in the number of low skilled workers.

This is the future of work. No middle ground. Increasingly fewer highly skilled specialists doing creative work, and more and more lower skilled workers doing what isn’t worth automating.