The past is more opaque than the future.
Even when we know the “rough” history of what transpired, it is sometimes hard to imagine, how things were before the natural evolution into the current “normalcy” occurred. I imagine that, very soon, it would be astounding to consumers that Amazon did not own any stores, and Apple did not make any phones. How was life before that?
In this respect, Barbara Garson’s The Electronic Sweatshop is revelatory, because it discusses a mind-and-place that is hard to imagine because many automated things came to be.
For examples, she writes (Pg. 177),
When typewriters were first introduced, their operators were also called “typewriters”. Later they became typists. So far in the electronic office, both machine and the operator are still called by the same name — word processors.
We know that now the term “word processor” is now almost without exception refer to the software that resides on our computers (as word-processing is not a dedicated job anymore — all of us are word processing).1 This is the kind of office future that Garson explores in The Electronic Sweatshop, a book written in 1988.
The book starts with the automation of service operations, beginning with the automation of service process at McDonald’s and the automation of travel agents at American Airlines and Air Canada (Remember travel agents?), essentially building call centers and service representatives.
About the birth of call centers: I am an operations researcher interested in queueing, and most of the theory has focused on efficiencies and engineering design. It would be fair to say that operations research (including my own research) has paid scant attention to issues of equity or socioeconomic considerations. Hence, for me, it is educational to go back into history and think about how firms and employees grappled with data tracking and automation in call centers.
The book argues that “the offices of the future are turning into factories of the past.” I think that fear has not come to pass, yet — but some worries about the automation of specific jobs were quite contextually relevant, as the jobs have indeed changed or some specific roles have disappeared into the past (typists, tellers, etc). In other cases, jobs like dedicated secretaries, etc, have changed into support services with a team of staff.
I also hypothesize sometimes automation in services has resulted in the transfer of costs to end-users. In the case of airline book agents’ jobs, some of the search and selection costs they previously incurred have been transferred to customers themselves. I now build my schedule of itineraries and type up my own reports. I prefer to do that, but I recognize that this is an outcome of the trade-off between flexibility and cost.
Despite all of this, I still consider automation as being less pervasive in services (compared to automation in manufacturing), even as AI/automation is accelerating in “high-touch services”.
Notes:
- I was reminded of the women, who were in charge of executing mathematical calculations being called “computers”, in the film, Hidden Figures.
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