The Whole Job Fallacy
Among the most common misconceptions I hear about the threat posed by AI to jobs is what I call the Whole Job Fallacy, the idea that if AI can’t do my whole job then it can’t replace me. Tell that to all the people who used to work as grocery store checkers and newspaper paste-up artists.
I live in a small mountain town with only one real grocery store. They’re constantly understaffed and have to pay stipends to employees to drive up the hill (i.e., a minimum 45-minute trip up the mountain) to work. So when automated checkout lanes became available they were thrilled. Instead of needing four checkers to man four checkout lanes, they could have a single checker overseeing eight self checkout lanes. They roughly doubled their throughput and cut staffing needs by 75%.
Notably, the self-checkout machines can’t do the whole job of a checker. A human is still needed to check IDs for alcohol purchases, sell cigarettes and stamps, and help confused customers. But the machines can do enough of the job that only one human is needed to the work of what was previously four. The other three people had to look for new jobs. But it’s not just grocery store checkers.
When I was in college in the late 1980’s I worked at the Austin American-Statesman as a copy clerk. In those days, reporters typed directly into green-screen ATEX 3000 video terminals. The system output photo-paper galleys which went to paste-up artists who in turn used X-Acto knives to cut them into columns and headlines and pasted them onto large boards, which were then used to create printing plates. It was a slow, labor-intensive process.
In those days a large metro newspaper might have employed 200 paste-up and related page-layout staff. That same job is now done digitally by a handful of pre-press technicians. Today’s digital systems don’t do the whole job, but they only require 10-20 humans for the same output. The other 180-190 people? Well, they had to look for other employment. Or, as labor economists like to fantasize, they were “freed up to do more meaningful work”.
You don’t have to look far for many more examples of partial automation reducing the need for total headcount and increasing unemployment in individual fields. Yes, new jobs were created. Someone has to program and maintain the automated grocery store checkout systems. Someone has to create and maintain the cloud-based production system now used by most newspapers. But I imagine parts of those jobs will soon be automated too.