Comparing job loss due to AI, with jobs lost due to spreadsheets 40 years ago

In My Humble Opinion
1

I keep reading that computers with Artificial Intelligence will eliminate millions of jobs, in many professions.
So I’d like to ask about a comparable situation from 40 years ago, in one specific profession, where computers took over the job:
The profession I’m asking about is : accounting. (for Brits, I think it’s called chartered accountacy)

Back in the late 1970’s , there were some early devices sold, called “home computers”. But nobody really knew what to do with them.
You could play a game like Ping-Pong, or keep your recipes in alphabetical order, or…well…not much else.
Then they created the “killer app”–a program that worked well and did something very useful…the first spreadsheets-- Visicalc , and Lotus1-2-3.
Suddenly, computer sales took off, and a revolution occurred in the accounting profession.
For simple bookkeeping and totaling up long columns of numbers, which used to be a full time job, now computers could do it in seconds…
And for complex projections, “running the numbers”, the same thing. There were full time jobs calculating how a change one parameter affects ten others. Now suddenly the computer could do it in seconds.

My question is, what happened to all those jobs?
What happened to the people who had been working their entire life as accountants in 1980, when suddenly the spreadsheet programs appeared in 1981?
And was that situation analogous to what is happening now in other fields, as Artificial Intelligence suddenly appears on the scene?.

(I was a college student in 1980, (Not in accounting!), but I don’t remember hearing any traumatic stories of impending doom due to these new computer thingies. But today, everybody seems in danger of losing their job due to computers)

2

What happened is that today all those accountants are using Quickbooks or whatever (unless they have retired in the meantime). It should not surprise you that coders are using Github Copilot, digital artists use Generative Fill, etc.; in fact I would already take all that for granted.

3

And drafting guys are using Autocad.

4

There was an episode of Computer Chronicles where they interviewed an accountant about his reaction when he first saw a spreadsheet. Literal tears of joy.

5

Computers in the 1980s did not replace jobs; they allowed people to do their jobs more quickly and more accurately.

My office got its first computer in 1985. I devised the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and supervised the process that got our budget in on time after not doing so for several years. That didn’t cost anyone their job. I did it in addition to my full-time job.

Another section of our department also got a computer to run some report on some pre-Access database manager. They stood there and waited for the report to run. And waited and waited. Then they called the budget office, because there were no IT staff and the budget people handed out the computers. They finally figured out that the program was working fine. It would just need nine hours to finish.

Another time I got asked to do a report on an outside agency and make recommendations. I said they desperately needed to hire someone to do computers. I got chewed out because it turned out that the report was supposed to be pro-forma reducing their budget as a political matter.

People were not at all worried about losing their jobs when PCs came into offices. PCs were both time-savings wonders and enormous time sinks because of the learning process. People had to learn how to use computers in addition to everything else they were already behind on. That computers took a couple of decades to be embedded into society seems strange to us now because that period of them being a huge burden is forgotten. That anyone could plug them in and expect them to do their jobs instantly wasn’t even a fantasy. There’s no comparison between the two eras.

6

There has been a lot of debate over whether “computers” increased productivity and unemployment, and much depends on the dates one chooses to examine. One argument is they haven’t reduced work so much as moved it around. One trivial example: in 1995, an academic journal I contributed to announced that it would no longer edit articles for house style. That work now had to be done by the writers if their article was accepted and they wanted it published. So one had to learn the house style (serial comma? Double quotes? Period inside or outside quotation marks? Colour or color?) At the same time, the university I was at sent a memo to professors saying department secretaries were no longer responsible for typing or word processing profs’ manuscripts. Neither the unpaid copy editor or secretaries lost their jobs, but some of their work was loaded onto professors. These banal examples suggest that sometimes computers don’t eliminate work, they just move it around,

7

Yes, technology does not necessarily cost jobs at all - historically it has been a major contributor to steadily increasing in productivity:

But I think the concern is that the effect of AI has no analogy in past technology, it is unprecedented. In a sense, it’s kind of weird to see this as a “problem”. We’re basically saying that we can produce far more overall without needing to work at all. The problem lies in managing the transition so that we all benefit. Ultimately, it’s not compatible with our current form of capitalism.

8

Not all of them. To do the job of one accountant with a spreadsheet used to take a much larger number of accountants. And yes, some of those people who used to do accounting maybe didn’t have the job title of “accountant”, but it still represented some part of their work load, and if now the secretary doesn’t have to help with the accounting, now you need fewer secretaries.

But yeah, humans doing less work is, on net, a benefit. Everyone always thinks that people need jobs, but that’s not really accurate. Everyone needs a livelihood, and most folks need a vocation, but there’s no reason those two things need be united into the single thing we call a “job”.

9

I remember temping at a bank operations center during the overnight, and there was a little team of 2 ladies who showed up at 6 pm and worked until 3 am compiling some sort of reporting on the mainframes that the resulting reports were absolute reams of greenbar in those funny cardboard covers, though I honestly have no idea why they would need to print out 4 or 5 banker boxes of reports every night instead of compiling it down even further and further and come out on a computer not printed. I mean, this was 1985 and every desk in the building had a computer on it [pretty much rows and rows of desks, little offices and conference rooms, and a secure area that was the counting and processing area, I used it as the basis for a hiding spot in a game of zombie attack we had been playing using some form of nonfantasy D&D sort of rules one of the local guys had been writing. Nice being locked into a comfortable area behind armor and 2 inch armored glass with its own private generator, air conditioning, lighting, security cameras aimed every direction and working bathrooms =) ]

10

People thinking that tech will ‘take all the jobs’ forget that people themselves are valuable. If a computer can take thr job of a human, that frees the human up for higher valued work.

In the 1940’s, there were 350,000 women employed as telephone operators at AT&T. Within a few years, all those jobs were gone, replaced by automated switching. Where did they go? Some went to college, but the late 40’s and 50’s saw the rise of the ‘secretarial school’, and a lot of ex switchboard operators went there.

Drafting was a huge occupation. Any engineering firm before about 1980 was filled with rows of drafting tables and people sitting at them with rulers, protractors, and other tools to manually draw complicated things. Then CAD came along and made them 10 times more productive. Did 9/10 lose their jobs? Nope. They basically just picked up more work, or changed specialties to UI design or full engineering. I’m sure there are fewer ‘draftsmen’ today, but lots of CAD/CAM operators, UI designers, QAs, web designers, and all kinds ofrelated jobs enabled by the same tech.

11

The job of “accountant” didn’t disappear with the invention of the Excel spreadsheet. Companies still need someone in that role of “keeping, inspecting, and analyzing financial information”. Accounting is more than just the bookkeeping tasks of entering transactions into the general ledger. It also involves creating financial reports, detecting fraud, ensuring cash is being used efficiently and a host of other activities that are a lot more interesting than entering debits and credits.

What the software does is eliminate much of the tedious work and increase the capabilities of the core accounting staff. If the office accounting can spend less time doing manual bookkeeping and has all the general ledger data in an easy to use software program, they can now do things like quickly create ad-hoc reports to address specific scenarios and business decisions.

Unfortunately software may eliminate a number of low-level, probably dead end jobs.

The concern with AI is that you might not need thousands of jobs where you need a trained CPA with years of experience to perform accounting-related tasks for the company. It might be the CEO (or CEO-bot) can simply ask the Accounting-bot “create the quarterly financial reports” or “create a financial projection if we expand into this market”.

Personally I think that’s still a long way off. We are currently in the “AOL” stage of AI. Which means, much like the internet in the 90s, we are seeing the potential for how some really cool and powerful tech, but right now we have no idea how it’s going to impact society in 5, 10, 20 years.

12

Unfortunately, that leaves the people in “low-level, probably dead end jobs” unemployed and possibly living in a cardboard box. People aren’t taking those jobs because they love them, they’re taking them because they need to pay their bills. What happens to them? Even if those jobs go away the bills will still keep coming.

It’s a particular problem for such people who are over 40 because ageism exists and there is reluctance to re-train people over that age for other jobs.

I’ve been put out of my career twice due to advancing technology. Yes, I got a different job in a different area, but it’s tiring to have to start over again, especially the older you get. Especially since, as you get older, people assume you can’t learn new things (you very much can) or that you’re not worth investing the time and effort in.

Attempting to go back to school these days to get re-training on your own is expensive, and in too many cases seems to generate debt rather than a new job/career. Most of my younger co-workers in the big box retail store where I work already have a college degree, but they’re stocking shelves and running a cash register instead of working in the field they intended (and no, most aren’t squishy liberal-arts degrees) while trying to pay off crushing school debts. Most of us older folks run the cost-benefit analysis while looking at what the kids are going through and decide to try to find another way to deal with the situation. But if you don’t have the piece of paper you don’t even get your foot in the door for “higher-order jobs”. Without the “higher-end job” though, you don’t have the income to pay for the training to get the piece of paper to get that job. It’s a vicious circle.

Fun fact - most financial aid is geared to people getting their FIRST degree. If you want to go back 20 years later and get a different degree you’re on you’re own, even if that prior degree is now obsolete. The only option for those of us with a four-year degree already is loans, loans, and more loans. And you just have to read the news to realize how problematic that is.

I have the good fortune to have some smarts and broad-use talents. Yay me. What about those who don’t? Do we just leave them to starve?

Sure, AFTER the transition period we’ll all be buddy-buddies with our personal chatbot and making pottery and woven baskets for the love of art while making money as an internet influencer but during the transition there will be a lot of people unemployed and discarded by our society, then blamed for not having the foresight to predict the future 30 years in advance when they went to school so they would have chosen a different path in life. Shame on you for choosing a profession that looked like a certain way to generate an income for life that was eliminated 30 years later due to technology you, as the average human being, couldn’t have seen coming!.

Yes. And then what will those thousands with a CPA do for a living? Yeah, yeah, I know - find a different job! As someone who has had to start over twice (so far - it could happen all over again) it’s not that easy. It’s possible - I have, after all, done it twice - but it is not easy and it only gets harder with age. I don’t think our society is going to make that an easy thing, because it never has before. Especially for someone, as I noted, over 40 switching gears is going to be some hard and stressful years. A lot in that category do get a different line of work but there is zero guarantee it will be comparable in pay, it may well be less. (After 10 years in my latest “career” I am currently making only 3/5’s of what I was making when I first posted on the Dope, as an example)

These changes are disruptive, and I don’t find it satisfactory to just say “oh, it will be alright in the end” and not actually give a damn about the people who will suffer harm during that transition to better and more glorious future.

13

The flaw in the OP premise, as several others have pointed out, is that new computing tools 40 years ago didn’t replace human jobs, they provided new tools to make those jobs easier and more productive, provided you were able to adapt. Humans were still needed to do the work. Whereas now, AI is becoming, or already is, smart enough to replace human higher-level jobs entirely.

I went through a similar paradigm shift in the early 80s comparable to the accounting profession and spreadsheets. I was a graphic artist, originally trained on an art board with rapidograph ink pens on vellum, shooting negatives on a camera from color separated overlays to make the printing plates. Then the Macintosh ‘desktop publishing’ revolution came along. I was not only able to pick up doing graphics on a Mac, I found I had a real knack for working with Macs and peripheral equipment in general.

I was eventually hired in my late 20s to run and modernize a graphics department where they were still doing graphics on art boards. I ordered Macs and printers and scanners, built a Mac-based graphics department, trained the graphic artists willing to learn, and hired a couple new ones who knew Macs. The former manager, let’s call him Frank, who I thought was retiring, I learned later was pretty much forced into an early retirement (he was in his early 60s, not much older than I am now) because he was too much of an old-school graphics guy.

I later got into web development. Now I’m feeling a bit like ol’ Frank, except I’m kind of worried I might be replaced by AI instead of a younger human (I still worry about being replaced by younger humans, too, though). AI can build websites, it can write code, it can write copy, it can even create pretty good artwork. Even if I was willing and able to adapt to the new AI development world, what do I adapt to? Yeah, I’ve heard that there will spring up new careers of people who specialize in giving the AIs exact parameters to do the work, but I imagine one guy telling an AI what to do can replace a dozen web developers and coders. Maybe a hundred.

14

One guy, capable of defining all of the information to be displayed by the website and has the ability to verify that the AI website displays it correctly. Creating and maintaining a commercial website is more than just writing code. I’d say the AI is just a tool in the process that at most will just shuffle some job descriptions.

15

You mean, say, for example, a … project manager?

Ohhh, ok, thanks for the schooling on commercial web dev, Crane! :wink:

In general, currently a project manager for a commercial website will coordinate anywhere from one person to a team of designers and UX/UI people, who work on the general look, feel and usability of the site. Then one or more front-end devs build and style it, then a team of programmers will build the back-end processes and connect it all up to the front end. And then there are copy writers, QA testers, etc.

Theoretically, one PM could direct everything to an AI, which could then replace all the other jobs. Of course, in the real world, things don’t work entirely top-down like that-- the designer/UX/UI people need to communicate the needs of the site functions to the programmers, the front end devs sometimes need to tell the designers their ambitious design won’t all work given the current tech or desired budget or parameters, or everyone needs to politely tell the PMs their requests are ridiculous. A lot of PMs are glorified paper-shufflers with no real tech experience who got Peter-principled into their jobs :smile:

But one good PM who really knows the industry, working with an AI, can potentially replace a lot of current web dev jobs, I would imagine.

16

Well, there is apparently one job that’s not going to be taken over anytime soon…helpline staff.

There’s also a study published on the issues with ai responding to human beings with potentially critical advice.

The Challenges in Designing a Prevention Chatbot for Eating Disorders: Observational Study - PMC (nih.gov)

17

And drone operator, according to this incident which may or may not have actually occurred

And I recently saw a comment somewhere asking what happens when the AI cleaning machine realizes that the best way to keep the place clean is to kill the people messing it up.

Interesting cautionary tales, but problems with solutions, hopefully from humans because how will AI answer the question of “How to keep AI in check?”

A better job to compare the impact of AI to would be photography. Digital photography put a lot of professional photographers out of work and/or changed the specifics of the job – less time developing photos, more time performing digital manipulation. But it also created a new workforce of amateur photographers – people who happen to be good at taking photos no longer need a big investment to get started, and many occasions don’t require the expertise of a professional. Which illustrates one of the best features of technology – leveling the playing field, enabling small players in fields formerly dominated by large companies or specialists.

18

A couple of generations ago, everybody was asking when the robots who were going to take everybody’s jobs would revolt and start killing humans.

AI, of course, is a higher level of sophistication. Humans, however, are not.

19

…this, of course, is the real risk to jobs from AI. People over-estimating what AI can really do.

AI obviously can be helpful as a chatbot. But its utility as a specialised chatbot for healthcare is just not there yet. Its not ready for prime-time. It will put lives at risk.

AI isn’t going to replace the television writer. AI can be used to quickly churn out SEO-friendly blog posts that might improve a websites search rankings. But it hasn’t written a single filmable 22 minute script yet. Because it can’t.

AI (as it is at the moment) fits into a very specific wheelhouse. And within that wheelhouse, it does the job really well. But a few months ago on Elon’s Twitter all I was seeing were advertisements for NFT’s. Now all I’m seeing are advertisements for AI. The push to monetize is on, which means overstating and hyping what it is that AI can do, which will inevitably lead to job losses in areas where AI is not-up-to-the-job.

20

You are welcome.

With such capable management as your super PM, perhaps the company would only need a CEO and a chatbot. They could do it all.

Proper use of an LLM is a skill, and the work product requires expert review. Outside of call centers and brothels, I don’t see it decreasing employment.

It’s a useful tool. We’ll know the actual impact when the novelty wears off.