Automating yourself out of existence

On an individual level, it seems like a no-brainer that if you automate your personal tasks and improve your workflow, your employer should reward you. The difficult part is what to do when you automate the tasks of an entire department and suddenly no-one has anything left to do.

“From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work. I am not joking. For 40 hours each week, I go to work, play League of Legends in my office, browse Reddit, and do whatever I feel like. In the past six years, I have maybe done 50 hours of real work.” When his bosses realised that he’d worked less in half a decade than most Silicon Valley programmers do in a week, they fired him.

About a year later, someone calling himself or herself Etherable posted a query to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web’s most important forums for programmers: “Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?” Reactions split between those who felt Etherable was cheating, or at least deceiving, the employer, and those who thought the coder had simply found a clever way to perform the job at hand. Etherable never responded to the ensuing discussion.

“What I quite like about these stories is that it shows that automation still has the potential to reduce the amount of boring work we have to do,” Jamie Woodcock, a sociologist of work at the Oxford Internet Institute, told me. “Which was the promise of automation, which was that we wouldn’t have to work 60-hour workweeks, and we could do more interesting things like stay home with our kids.”

Yet many self-automators are afraid of sharing their code outside the cubicle. Even if a program impeccably performs their job, many feel that automation for one’s own benefit is wrong. That human labour is inherently virtuous—and that employees should always maximise productivity for their employers—is more deeply coded into American work culture than any automation script could be. And most employment contracts stipulate that intellectual property developed on company time belongs to the employer. So, any efficiency hack or automation gain an employee might make is apt to be absorbed by the employer, the benefits re-routed upstream.

“I don’t understand why people would think it’s unethical,” Woodcock said. “You use various tools and forms of automation anyway; anyone who works with a computer is automating work.” He says if any of these coders had sat in front of the computer, manually inputting the data day after day, they’d never be reprimanded. But by demonstrating that they’re capable of higher levels of efficiency, some may, perversely, feel like they’re shirking a duty to the companies that employ them. This is perhaps why automating work can feel like cheating, and be treated as such by corporate policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/