Transient Craft Guilds and the Future of Work

Poor Barack Obama. He had to spend his December prodding banks into being rational financial agents instead of agents of chaos; pushing Democrats into supporting a gutted-out health care reform plan pissed upon by the evil Lieberman toad; conjuring up prospects for new jobs in an economy destined to remain jobless; and browbeating nations in "Cop-enhagen" to care about whether human society exists in another 100 years or so. How did this scenario end up looking so unlike the 1933-era FDR?

For one thing, the ability of government to apply leverage to a self-organized economy run amok has declined significantly since the 1930s. Since the boom began in the 1980s, we have sped through the post-industrial, post-post-industrial, and post-post-post-industrial economies, to the point where entire infrastructures of jobs and artisan crafts are created and destroyed in a matter of months. Once upon a time (say, the 1970s), neo-Malthusians assumed that automation would leave a majority of the world's population unemployed. The reality is somewhat different - new abstractions of "work" keep a significant number of people employed, even (or particularly) in the developing world, but as automation takes over larger and larger sectors of the economy, we chase a froth on the goods-and-services tsunami to invent new means of placing intellectual stamps on a machine that adaptively grows and morphs and changes faster than we can document that change. And no FDR or Obama-FDR-wannabe can place brakes or a framework on that change.

A couple years ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency was shopping around a PowerPoint underscoring the fact that two-thirds of the jobs that college graduates will enter in five years will not have been invented when they entered college. In other words, college must teach core skills in very broad areas, without leaning to specifics, as the job descriptions will utterly change in four or five years. It's certainly been true in my field of journalism! Any J-school professor talking about the traditional print profession is about as useful as Latin Scholasticism in a business school.

What's even more astonishing is how the 21st century equivalent of the medieval craft guild creates and destroys itself, with all the accompanying infrastructure, in a matter of years or even months. An example from the recent past is chip design. Until the mid-1980s, semiconductor chips were middling collections of logic gates that were assembled by following simple rules of electronic theory and Boolean logic. But as their complexity grew to the size of a Manhattan street map, suddenly chip design required a mix of electronic-engineering and architectural-design talents that had never been demanded in previous generations of computer design. The specialists in this field had their own guild, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). An entire sub-industry developed of software companies dedicated to making the design of chips easier - the Electronic Design Automation or EDA software industry. And since chips followed Moore's Law in complexity growth, everyone assumed that chip design was a job with a guaranteed future.

Well, guess what? Semiconductor manufacturing moved from the US and Europe to China and Southeast Asia. Chips got to be so big and complex, their design involved the stringing together of predefined modules. The EDA software industry grew long in the tooth. And companies discovered that groups of designers working at chip plants in Asia could apply rules of innovation much more cheaply than well-paid postgrad experts in North America. In only 20 years, a craft guild has arisen, matured, and dissolved before our eyes.

Now, Web 2.0 and social-network development has led to new full-time job descriptions such as "Search Engine Optimization." For you uninitiated, SEO now entails a full-time job of searching for interesting algorithms by which your web content is prioritized in Google and other search engines. A craft guild is being assembled from the bottom up by practitioners of advanced web content and social-networking tools. Need I suggest that this entire craft guild will be obsolete in a decade, as search engines, operating systems, computing clouds and ad-hoc networks become adaptive and self-assembling, while displaying the rudiments of hive intelligence?

I'm optimistic enough to think that this still won't mean the end of jobs. The need to make our economic systems sustainable in an environmental sense will assure a new generation of craft guilds growing from green tech/cleantech. But the accelerated pace with which new job descriptions are created and destroyed shows how difficult it is for governments to observe, regulate, and prevent meltdowns in the strange world of 21st-century capitalism. In particular, the abstracted nature of financial instruments makes the financial sector "disappear through the skylight" -- and we're worried about executive pay bonuses!

Several bloggers, most notably David Sirota, recently have talked about applying the phrase "moral hazard" from the financial world to the capitalist economy at large. If the notion that all decisions on business development, job creation, and macroeconomies can be made with moral considerations foremost, I'm all for it. But we must embed the awareness of the moral hazard from the bottom up. The economy, and the nature of work, is changing too fast for government or even non-profit NGOs to keep up. It's up to all of us to try and tame the tiger as we ride it, directing its future morphing in productive directions, or it will surely swallow us all.