That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [44]
We think the best way to understand today’s labor market is to blend Katz, Autor, and Kessler. That yields four types of jobs. The first are “creative creators,” people who do their nonroutine work in a distinctively nonroutine way—the best lawyers, the best accountants, the best doctors, the best entertainers, the best writers, the best professors, and the best scientists. Second are “routine creators,” who do their nonroutine work in a routine way—average lawyers, average accountants, average radiologists, average professors, and average scientists. The third are what we would call “creative servers,” nonroutine low-skilled workers who do their jobs in inspired ways—whether it is the baker who comes up with a special cake recipe and design or the nurse with extraordinary interpersonal bedside skills in a nursing home or the wine steward who dazzles you with his expertise on Australian cabernets. And the fourth are “routine servers,” who do routine serving work in a routine way, offering nothing extra.
Attention: Just because you are doing a “nonroutine” job—as, say, a doctor, lawyer, journalist, accountant, teacher, or professor—doesn’t mean that you are safe. If you do a nonroutine high-skilled job in a routine way—if you are what we would call a “routine creator”—you will be vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, or digitization, or you will be the first to be fired in an economic squeeze. And just because you are a server, doing some face-to-face job, doesn’t mean you are safe. You, too, will be vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, foreign labor digitization—or you will be the first to be fired in an economic squeeze.
Remember George Clooney. No one is safe.
On March 4, 2011, lawyers in America woke up to this headline in The New York Times: “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.” The story explained:
When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery”—providing documents relevant to a lawsuit—the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates. But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000. Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts … even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents. “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”
So this is the world we are in. This is where every conversation about how we must fix our economy and transform our schools has to start. In this world, America must have companies that are more productive—that are using the tools of hyperconnectivity in every way possible to produce more goods and services with fewer people—and we must have more and more companies that spawn decent-paying jobs.
There is only one way to square this circle: more innovation powered by better education for every American. A healthy economy is one driven not just by greater efficiency and productivity but also by innovation. That is, more people inventing more goods