BARCELONA, Spain – Mobile World Congress 2017 provided a glimpse into how automation is currently enabled by the internet of things, and, down the line will be further emboldened by “5G” networks. Use cases ranging from lights out manufacturing to driverless trucking promise a future where common tasks will be turned over to software-controlled systems.
What wasn’t highlighted or brought into clear focus at the show is what that means for the global workforce. Marcus Wheldon, president of Nokia Bell Labs, summed up the vision of automation a few months ago during a keynote address at the SCTE/IBSE Cable Tec Expo in Philadelphia: “One of the reasons we’re excited about the future is we think the future is nothing like today. We’re going to build a new network architecture. The point of the future is still about entertaining people, but it’s equally about changing our world by instrumenting everything. You can automate all mundane tasks. It’s to create time. My first task is to create time.”
So that’s a summary of the near-philosophical vision. Now, I’ll summarize what is, to me, the biggest problem. What about the billions of people who spent their time doing those “mundane tasks” that are now automated? Building on that, if the overarching goal of the telecommunications industry is to monetize the creation of time, what’s the industry’s responsibility, if any, to those people? To ask it another way, if you’re the company or industry that displaces a huge part of the workforce, do you have a socioeconomic duty to lead the broader discussion around how these foundational shifts will impact us all?
Let’s take a look at autonomous trucking, which will depend on wireless telecommunications technologies, as an example. Major manufacturers including Volvo, Scania and Daimler last year cooperated on the European Truck Platooning Challenge, which saw fleets of self-driving trucks arrive in the Netherlands from locations in Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Belgium. The trucks, overseen by a human backup, used Wi-Fi connected sensors, processors and radios to communicate, with the lead truck sending its actions to the following vehicles, which would mimic the machinations. This concept could revolutionize how goods move through supply chains. Fewer drivers could cover more ground in less time, the sheer physics of platooning could cut down on fuel consumption and traffic congestion could be eased as a function of how close together the trucks are positioned.
Here’s the downside – in May 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tallied 1,678,280 “heavy and tractor-trailer drivers” earning a mean annual wage of $42,500. Extend the same concept to “light truck or delivery services drivers,” and that’s another 826,510 jobs that earn an average of $34,080 per year. Expand it again to include “taxi drivers and chauffeurs” and there’s another 180,960 jobs producing an average of $26,070 per year. From just one part of one vertical in one country, that’s 2.6 million jobs that spread more than $100 billion per year into the larger economy.
I had the opportunity to speak with Susan Welsh de Grimaldo of Strategy Analytics in Barcelona during MWC. She recalled, on her way to the venue, she was talking with her cab driver and mentioned the prevalence of autonomous vehicles on the show floor. “He’s like, ‘wait a minute. What does that mean for my job?’” she said. “I’ve also heard about job creation opportunities. I also heard a lot about, even within telcos, retooling their own skill sets. A lot of the skills people have to do today, with all the transition on the network to software-defined networking and NFV and things like that happening, a lot of those tools and skills will be legacy. People are going to lose jobs. Will they have the right skills for the new jobs that are available?”
A major trend in telco, driven by the need for software-defined networking and network functions virtualization, is what Welsh de Grimaldo referred to as “retooling.”
Margaret Chiosi, distinguished network architect at AT&T Labs, in an interview last year, called it “reskilling.” AT&T, with its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy initiative, is a leader in the push toward software control, which often comes with an organizational shift to what’s commonly called a devops model. As Chiosi explained, “It would be great if all the operators improved their software development skillsets. This would help accelerate the realization of the SDN-enabled cloud. Because of this need, AT&T is reskilling our workforce: from hardware to software skills; wireline to IP and wireless skills; from data reporters to data scientists. This is a company wide initiative and we are providing a number of ways for our employees to build on top of the skills they already have and gain new ones.”
But this isn’t an easy thing to do. On the sidelines of MWC, Ann Hatchell, VP of network marketing for Amdocs, said that based on her conversations with operator customers, “I think probably the No. 1 pain point, it always sort of comes down to this ability to transition their own workforce. Virtualization is a cultural challenge. It’s a challenge just in terms of the resources that have been dedicated to lots of functions. Many [operators] have their own training programs to start bringing these organizations together. It’s interesting because as the technologies converge across multiple domains, that means addressing these challenges.”
The point here is that the telecom industry, which is in many ways creating the need for massive retooling and reskilling in every other industry, is having trouble accomplishing the same thing. So where does that leave the long-haul truckers, delivery drivers and cabbies?
In a video interview with Welsh de Grimaldo and Monica Paolini, founder and president of Senza Fili Consulting, Paolini commented: “You can resist change but that doesn’t work. You need to embrace change. You need to say, ‘what’s the best you can do out of it.” Picking up on the fate of cabbies, she said, “If you really look at how many cab drivers you’re going to have today and 20 years from now, that’s really the wrong way to look at the question. We need to just look at the big picture and understand what is it as a society … we need to do to adapt to that change but not resist it. The connectivity is just going to be the fabric that unites it all. It’s good and it’s good news for the industry.”
There’s more good news too. There are eyes on the big picture and there’s time to address it. Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates, in a recent interview with Quartz, examined the workforce aspects of turning manual processes over to algorithms.
“Right now, the human worker does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things,” Gates said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
Gates said automation would free up labor, which in turn could be used to improve elder services, education and other “things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique. … So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you’re net ahead.” Here’s a transcript of that fascinating interview.
As to the timing, “It won’t happen overnight,” Welsh de Grimaldo said. “I don’t think we see a lot of these jobs go away real quickly. So I think there’s time to prepare, but I think it’s time to really start thinking through as citizens, as government, as associations like GSMA, what role do we all play?”
I’d like to start a dialogue with our community here at RCR Wireless News to get some insight into the answer to that question: What role do we all play? Contact me at skinney@rcrwireless.com and follow me on Twitter @seankinneyRCR.
