In the next two decades, 47% of US jobs are at risk of being automated away, an alarming Oxford study found last week.
But computers create as well as destroy jobs: Economist Tyler Cowen points out that an unmanned Predator drone requires 168 workers to keep it in the air for 24 hours, whereas one sortie by an F-16 is backed by fewer than 100 workers. Our economic future will increasingly be a story of those who complement computers. And though it may be counterintuitive to say so, that means big potential upside for women.
Why, when the computer-programming field remains dominated by men? Because women are more conscientious. Women are also more likely to ask for help or acknowledge their limits. Women are more modest, and modesty, it turns out, will be an invaluable trait in the future.
Cowen’s new book “Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation” (Dutton) envisions a future in which an elite meritocracy of perhaps 10% or 15% of Americans will enjoy splendid wealth — but everybody else is downwardly mobile. We’re still at the dawn of the age of the digitized info economy, but in the future the gap between those who can team up well with computers and those who can’t will only widen.
Consider the new trend of “freestyle chess.” Though a machine can beat the world’s best chess players, that same machine can be beaten by another computer that is aided by an expert player. Raw technological prowess, impressive as it is, can be made even better with the human factor — but only if that human exercises modesty. The computer is going to make the optimal move most of the time, and the more arrogant the player, the more likely he is to make the unwise decision to override its decisions.
The notion has wide applications in other fields: Cowen foresees a health-care system in which diagnoses are increasingly made by computer. Doctors should recognize that the computer is going to nail the case far more often than not, and those who are so convinced of their own infallibility that they frequently ignore the software’s findings will have poorer results than less arrogant doctors.
How does this play out in terms of gender? Keep in mind that one of the most common and preventable sources of deadly infections in hospitals is failure to wash hands. One study found that women doctors washed their hands after 88% of patient contact, but for men that figure was 54%. That’s arrogance, a belief that you are such a great medicine man that you couldn’t possibly be ferrying disease.
Changes in higher education will reward superior female conscientiousness. Today college is essentially a four-year vacation from reality for the children of the well-off that produces a valuable credential. But free online universities are turning that model upside down: Within a few years, students who paid nothing for their tuition but crammed intensely and learned much more than the average kid at Party U. will be presenting themselves to employers, who will not fail to notice the new source of talent.
Picture a college education as a lump of gold that previously was available only to those who purchased, at great expense, a gold-mining license. If you happened to grow up in a slum in Mumbai, you couldn’t even get to the licensing office. Meanwhile, employers were accepting the license to mine gold as proof that a job applicant was valuable.
Now picture a layer of gold that is buried at a uniform distance underneath the surface of the Earth, with mining tools — that would be the Internet — sold cheaply almost everywhere. Anyone with smarts and determination can go down and get the gold. Are employers in 2023 going to ask about your license — the college diploma — or if you have the gold — the education or skill set?
The most conscientious, self-motivated students, regardless of where they came from, will eat the lunch of the kids who didn’t bother to learn a useful skill in college. Cowen points out, “women are more likely to follow instructions and orders with exactness and without resentment. . . . There is plenty of evidence that women are less interested in direct workplace competition and more likely to work well in teams.”
Women have a new word for the masculine tendency to belittle feminine input while asserting expertise they don’t necessarily possess: mansplaining. In an increasingly meritocratic and linked world, mansplaining will prove to be a costly flaw.
“If you’re a young male hothead who just can’t follow orders, and you have your own ideas about how everything should be done,” writes Cowen, “you’re probably going to have an ever-tougher time in the labor markets of the future. There won’t be much room for a ‘rebel without a cause’ or, for that matter, a rebel with a cause.”
Men have already been punished by de-industrialization that values office skills more than physical strength. Now we’d better learn that we can’t mansplain our way through the e-economy.