DC Velocity - November 2013

72 DC VELOCITY NOVEMBER 2013 www.dcvelocity.com
AS ANY STUDENT OF LITERATURE KNOWS, THE THREE
basic types of conflict in fiction are “man against man,” “man
against nature,” and “man against himself.” But in the business
world, the conflict more often is about “man against machine.”
Many a school kid gets his or her introduction to “man against
machine” conflict in the classic American folk tale of John Henry
versus the steam drill. The story centers on former slave John
Henry, who after the Civil War went to work for the Chesapeake &
Ohio Railroad as a steel-driver. Part of a team of men who cleared
the path for the railroad, Henry spent his days driving steel wedges
into rock, which were then filled with explosives
to lay the path. In a version of the story by S.E.

Schlosser, Henry is described as “a mighty man, the strongest and most powerful working the rails.” Revered by his co-workers, Henry was said to be able to do the work of three, spending days driving “holes by hitting thick steel spikes into rocks” with his 14-pound sledge hammer.

One day, a salesman appeared at the work site promoting a new steam-powered driver he claimed could out-drill any man. There were, of course, disbelievers. His claim was tested by a contest between Henry and the newfangled steam-powered driver. The site foreman ran the steam driver. Henry pulled out two gigantic 20- pound sledges and went to work furiously pounding away alongside the contraption.

When the dust settled, Henry had drilled two seven-foot holes to the machine’s one nine-foot hole. Man beat machine, but tragically, Henry collapsed and died of exhaustion.

The next day, and every day of the project thereafter, the steam-powered drill went to work. As time passed, more machines came on line, and fewer workers were needed. The new technology had supplanted humans.

Since then, the story has been repeated time and again, with new and increasingly sophisticated technologies taking over jobs once performed by people. With the advent of the computer age in the 1950s, the trend jumped into high gear.

Even so, the claims made by two Oxford University researchers
this fall were stunning. Most notable was their contention that in
the relatively short term (say, 40 to 50 years), as many as 50 per-
cent of all existing jobs in the U.S. could be vulnerable to replace-
ment by computers. Their report, The Future of Employment: How
Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? notes that,
“while people have been concerned at technology’s
ability to supplant human workers for hundreds of
years, modern advances in computing technology
mean that whole occupations may soon be made
obsolete.”
The study, conducted by Carl Frey and Michael
Osborne, looked at nearly 700 existing U.S. occupa-
tions and found that nearly one-half are at risk of
obsolescence. The authors argue that the next genera-
tion of big data-driven computers
will take the place of low-skilled
workers across myriad industries.
This time around, even jobs tra-
ditionally considered to be at low
risk of automation may be sucked
into the vortex—including some
related to the business of deliver-
ing goods. “Recent technological
progress is likely to have signifi-
cant consequences for logistics
and transportation,” Osborne says.
Take long-haul trucking, for
example. While a truck driver’s job
may seem safe in the short term,
advanced sensing technologies
and computing capabilities consti-
tute a very real threat down the road. “The Google dri-
verless car is now licensed to drive in the state of
Nevada,” says Osborne. “It won’t be too long until
such machines are able to substitute for human driv-
ers in a range of occupations.”
Perhaps this means the seemingly never-ending
motor carrier driver shortage will finally be
resolved. But this much at least is clear. As the tech-
nology hurtles forward, American workers who
underestimate the power of the machine risk going
the way of the mighty John Henry.