New technology rarely eliminates professional demand, because greater efficiency creates new ways for experts to add value.
Many of us remember of the PalmPilot craze of the 1990s when consultants, sales teams, and field scientist were convinced that stylus-driven electronic data-entry would replace manual note-taking. At the small environmental consultancy where I worked as a staff scientist, my colleagues and I would sit at the lunch table comparing our new devices, imagining how we’d program them to capture field data and measurements. It all seemed so revolutionary – we even wondered what it might mean for our own future, as professional field scientists. Would our knowledge and experience still be relevant, if every site observation could be reduced to a simple tap on a device?
But we weren’t replaced by the PalmPilot. Nor, a few years later, were we replaced by the waterproof field laptop, or remote datalogging sensors. Our jobs were also not rendered obsolete when third-party vendors interpreted database information on our behalf, nor when automated reporting templates promised to create our electronic deliverables for us. Somehow, at every stage of technological advancement, the human element was still needed. And so, behind the current hysteria surrounding artificial intelligence – more realistically described as ultrafast search engines linked to language output models – lies the unassailable fact that knowledgeable professionals will still be needed in the future. Likely, even more so.
What Jevons Paradox can teach us about AI and work
There’s an economic phenomenon that warrants consideration here. The effect is called Jevon’s Paradox, after the 19th-century English economist William Stanley Jevons. He noted that in the decade after steam engine manufacturers developed improvements to use less coal, a critically dwindling fuel resource in England at the time, the total consumption of coal actually increased. The resulting increase was based on Jevon’s observation that when we learn to use a resource more efficiently, even with the intent to conserve that resource, the gain in efficiency drives greater use of the innovation. This leads to greater demand for, and use of, that very resource at a rate which offsets the resource savings achieved by the increase in efficiency.
Professionals engaged in a particular industry can also be considered a resource in this context. Consider a few other examples of Jevon’s Paradox at work through the years:
- When the elevator was invented, it didn’t replace the need for stairs, or those who built them. It allowed architects and builders to create taller buildings, which spurred a building boom and created more work for those same architects and builders.
- When e-books and internet blogs emerged, it didn’t kill the printed book industry. The flexibility and access to electronic written media expanded interest and options for readers, and created an entire ecosystem of written media – in which printed books remain dominant.
- LED lighting offered a lower per-unit consumption of energy than incandescent fixtures, but also created more ways to light anything beyond simple illumination. Billboards, appliances, machinery, vehicles, clothing, building facades and entire cityscapes are now lit by LEDs and innovation continues to drive an increased demand for lighting, energy sources, and design professionals.
Why new technology rarely eliminates professional demand
It’s worth keeping these and other examples in mind over the next few years, as others run in circles warning us that our jobs will disappear in the wake of new technological advances. Historically, that’s simply not been the case. Technological innovations create a period of disruption, followed by an often healthy adjustment during which the new technology is integrated into the economy or process. These foster a re-stabilization, during which Jevon’ Paradox is often observed – a new efficiency that drives new demand.
By the time we all realized that the PalmPilot was actually a bit unwieldy as a field logging device, that its handwriting recognition was slow and inaccurate, and that it wasn’t at all easy to program for simple data entry, we’d dropped interest in the early generation of handhelds. That is, until the smartphone came along. And per Jevon’s Paradox, while smartphones were also supposed to replace thousands of us with their ability to geolocate, capture and communicate data, we instead found new and better ways to do our jobs with the help of our smart phones.
How environmental professionals have adapted through change
Back in 1993 when I sat around the lunchroom wringing my hands about technology, the total U.S. workforce in the professional environmental field was 500,000 individuals, generating an annual revenue of approximately $150 billion, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Today, according to the same sources, the field has more than doubled to over 1 million professionals and generates over $550 billion annually.
Think about how your professional ecosystem has changed through technology since 1993. Through great change, it’s likely that you have adapted, and carried on. Jevon’s Paradox is still very much at work in our professional world – adapting to a new efficiency, and once again increasing the demand for a valuable resource – ourselves.
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David Coyne is a retired COO of an environmental consulting and engineering firm. Coyne can be reached at dcoyne.dc@gmail.com. |
