Una Mullally: Automation will wipe out the gig economy

Not so long ago, hiring a person to deliver something was a luxury. Couriers were the preserve of offices needing important documents sent somewhere fast. But now, many of us use a network of personal delivery drivers and cyclists to get what we want – a team of people at our disposal who bring food, books, grocery shopping and more to our doors.

The gig economy, a buzzphrase for the patchwork of work many people have to put together in order to survive, given how job security has decreased, is seen as both a symptom and consequence of a world in flux; where entire industries can crumble when undercut by digital change, where job titles are invented, bubbles inflated and money made and lost at neck-breaking speed.

Cities are moulding themselves to the gig economy. Eoghan Murphy talks about co-living (fancy hostels) for “workers”, a term to describe people with jobs that used to be vaguely socialist sounding, but now seems to apply to those in the tech sector. Along with temporary inbetweeny housing for temporary inbetweeny existences, co-working spaces are flourishing as more people exist in freelance, short-term contract work or in start-up businesses.

So much of the gig economy has been created by technology, yet so much of it will be erased by it too. Much of the temporary, transitory work that has emerged around digitally driven services and retail is a type of work that bridges a gap between job insecurity and automation.

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Fruit-picking robots, going into production in 2020, have a projected capability of being able to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day

Last week, drone company Manna announced it was partnering with a company that operates food-ordering platforms – Flipdish – with a view to beginning fast-food drone delivery by the end of the year in Dublin.

Delivery industry

The delivery industry has exploded in recent years, a consequence of impatient consumers demanding convenience and immediacy, as well as the proliferation of options across food, retail and travel. People spend their days wanting things faster – internet speed, JustEat, MyTaxi, Amazon – and then lean into wellness culture to offset the rush.

When automation really starts to hit, it’ll be those who were already in insecure work who will be the first to fall, from seasonal farm labours to truck drivers to call-centre workers. British company Fieldwork Robotics has built fruit-picking robots, which will be going into production in 2020, with a projected capability of being able to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day. Want to freak yourself out? Watch a video of the strawberry-picking capabilities of Agrobot.

The "services" being provided by transport apps are having a negative impact on how liveable cities are

Whether it’s Andrew Yang rattling off statistics about the havoc automation will wreak on the 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, where 80 per cent of all cargo is delivered by truck (the industry could save about $170 billion a year with automation), or the collapse of high-street retail in the UK (85,000 jobs were lost in retail in the UK in 2018, 150,000 if you include the hospitality sector, and the number of job losses on the UK high street predicted for 2019 is 175,000), this new era of work has one more hurdle: getting rid of, as much as possible, the most inefficient, blunder-prone, expensive, unreliable, and occasionally troublesome element of all work: human labour.

A lot of innovation responding to people’s impatience and demands seems to be about building up a brand with cheap labour and forsaking any responsibility over the rights of “workers”, and then seeing what parts of it can be automated.

Flooding cities with convenience also has terrible knock-on effects. Many of these “workers” – although companies would prefer to see them as independent contractors who just happen to occasionally piggyback on their app – have been demanding liveable wages. The “services” being provided by transport apps, for example, are having a negative impact on how liveable cities, in particular, are.

‘Freedom’ from work

In San Francisco, Uber and Lyft have increased traffic delays by 40 per cent in six years, according to a traffic-impact study by researchers at the University of Kentucky. As New York city’s subway crumbles and commuters grumble, 29 per cent of all Manhattan traffic is now for-hire vehicles, that’s 80,000 vehicles, two-thirds of which are using ride-hailing apps such as Uber.

If fewer people have jobs, then who's going to buy all those robot-picked strawberries?

Ordering fast-food has already transitioned to ordering from a kiosk rather than a human in outlets such as McDonalds. Bank workers often lobby customers in their queues to use a machine instead of a teller. Bank of America began opening branches without employees in 2017. Amazon says it will be at least 10 years (how reassuring) before their warehouses will be fully automated. Amazon Prime aims for one-day delivery times, with four hours between an order being placed and it being shipped from a warehouse. Volvo is already testing limestone-transporting autonomous trucks at the Brønnøy Kalk mine in Norway.

“Having technology work for us will give us freedom,” the managing director of the mine, Raymond Langfjord, is quoted as saying on Volvo’s website. “For example, the machines can work when we want to sleep.”

The pursuit of automation becomes self-fulfilling; fewer people enter into jobs that will potentially be automated, and as a result the need for automation increases due to labour shortages. Soon that gig economy of delivery nixers (temporary, insecure, underpaid, and unprotected), viewed as a great way to top up one’s earnings in a world of fragmented jobs, will be another footnote in this era’s reimagining of labour. And if fewer people have jobs, then who’s going to buy all those robot-picked strawberries?