The end of obedience. Interview with Theo Wehner

By Simone Achermann

Computer are supposed to obey, people aren‘t. To be different from the intelligent machines, we need a high degree of imagination and individuality, says Theo Wehner, professor of industrial psychology at ETH Zurich. The jobs of the future are therefore not to be found in industry, but in every one of us.

Mr Wehner, how is work going to change in the next few decades?

We will all be allowed to work less – we may even have to. Automation has already led to a dramatic compaction and rationalisation of work. Today, the output of thirty years ago can be done by half the number of people. That situation will be even more extreme in another thirty years.

The Economist says that as many as half of all jobs in the USA could be performed by machines in another twenty years. Is that realistic?

I think so. Where automation is feasible it will even be significantly more. Car manufacturing or refrigerator assembly will be 90 percent automated, for example. That’s technical progress: before the first carwash opened in Seattle in 1951, there were just short of 1 million car cleaners in the USA; their employment rate in 1970 was close to zero: people – men – wash their own cars or take them through the carwash in person.

Could knowledge workers like journalists or professors be replaced as well?

To enable automation, tasks have to be standardised and trivialised to a level where they can be reproduced by machine. We’ll soon have reached that stage in journalism. Even today, a lot of articles contain no intrinsic journalistic expertise. But if the text consists solely of a more or less meaningful compilation of facts and figures it can just as well be generated by algorithms. That applies to academic articles as well. What personal ideas or creative utterances are there in our peer reviewed journals nowadays? Every idea that isn’t referenced is thrown out. Academic papers these days are so “McDonaldised” that in a few years’ time the computer will be able to write them.

What work will never be done by machine?

All the work that’s focused on human relations. Client advisors or psychotherapists won’t be replaced. Emotionrelated work can’t be automated. But even here, automation is encroaching to some extent. If we cast our minds back to washing at the village well, or even the municipal washhouses: women didn’t just do their laundry there. They talked about their joys and no doubt even more about their sorrows and troubles, and shared them. It was a social place, almost a therapeutic setting. The places where washing-machines and tumble driers are installed today aren’t suited to that. That said, we tend to spend more time on our laundry nowadays – even though we’re not forced to do it physically – than ever before.

Does automation also create new jobs?

Lots and lots of residual activities at the moment. Jobs that can’t be performed automatically yet and are often done by what we call “low skilled” people, mostly foreign workers, and that will be rationalised away in the next wave of automation. Waste disposal is one example; the collection trucks can pick the bins up automatically nowadays, putting them in the “right” position is the residual job a human still has to do.

And no other new jobs will arise in the future?

Of course they will. And they’ll be created by the people who are the real employers even today: every single one of us who is not incapacitated by physical frailty or mental affliction. If new jobs are to be created, we can’t just hang around till industry offers them. A business owner is only interested in the exact number of jobs he needs to manufacture marketable products or services. We have to create the jobs and professional fields of the future ourselves: through more individual creativity, more independence and entrepreneurship. One initiative in Switzerland is putting forward a conceptual offering that’s extremely interesting from that point of view: the unconditional basic income. Work and income would be radically separated. It would be a historical first – and a major challenge, if not actually overwhelming most of us to start with. But at the same time, it would be a platform for a whole lot more imagination. Because our subsistence would be secured, we would have more time and leisure not just to think about other commodities, but also to reflect on the individual’s and society’s true needs and design our work accordingly. I don’t know exactly how we would handle our new-won freedom. But simple work would have to be made more attractive, rationalised out of existence or performed by every individual. The huge numbers of wage-dependent people would of course be gone – and that always includes subsistence-dependent people who would rely on having such poor jobs, sometimes even two or three of them at a time.

What would be the typical features of these independent jobs?

More individuality, creativity and personal commitment. Even with no prospect of an unconditional basic income, we have to start realigning ourselves with our own needs, ideas and abilities instead of focusing primarily on the job market and promises of training. When workers move on, it’s hardly ever about their experience and about what they actually want, but about offers of training and development. That’s because every society urges young people on to reproduce the features of that society. And in most societies that means learning a profession that gives you a good chance of a job. How can we still speak of professions in this day and age! Late mediaeval times were the age of the professional society, as sociologists know – the present is about deprofessionalisation. One demonstration of that is citizen journalism from crisis areas, even if it doesn’t come in HD quality. Anyone who still believes that professionalism represents the pinnacle of knowledge is completely wrong. New technologies have put us on track for the professionalisation of Everyman; another long-in-the-tooth sociological theory that’s easy to prove: tweeting, googling, blogging are not done on a professional footing. Amateur status is the appropriate level of expertise and has produced LINUX and more.

But the universities are still training up very narrowly focused specialist workers.

That’s right, the emphasis is purely on the academic discipline. That’s why our university, ETH Zurich, has made an appeal for “critical thinking”; though I would prefer to call it “critical teaching”. Because why aren’t the students critical? That was the feedback the heads of the university got from practitioners, and that’s what triggered the initiative. They aren’t critical because they pass their endless exams much more easily if they imbibe the material uncritically, or rather mechanically. If you learn other

people’s thinking by rote, you’re rewarded by good marks. The big question today is how far I need to think convergently, i.e. in depth, to be able to act divergently in practice – i.e. across disciplinary boundaries. That question can only be answered by people who don’t base everything on their subject knowledge.

Professors have to change the teaching and exam system. What could companies do for more creative employees?

They have to challenge their employees. They shouldn’t make rules demanding functioning, stable systems, they should call for instability to be further developed and for the unexpected to be managed. We need learning organisations so that new technologies become a challenge, not a threat. 20th century management concentrated on mastering processes and creating fixed job descriptions. We have to shed this focus. The former CEO of Novartis ventured on something new with the Novartis Campus. Not just the open-plan offices and labs, but even the grounds are laid out to enable employees from different departments and across hierarchical boundaries to meet by chance, chat informally, learn from each other and create new ideas. That’s a great start. However, the tasks have to be redefined as well. In actual reality, most so-called knowledge workers – not just at Novartis – currently plough their way through Excel sheets and hardly ever meet anyone by chance. At this point in time, nobody knows how much chaos a company can stand and how much control it needs. We have to find out by starting to loosen up the structures. Even today, most people arrive at the workplace with a need for high stability already instilled in them and aren’t prepared to accept a certain degree of instability, let alone help to create it.

How can we change that?

By finally taking our chance to help shape things seriously and not deferring our search for meaning till after work, or presuming it can only be found in our personal interests. We have to start in the workplace. Two thirds of people already say they would sacrifice status or money for a more meaningful job. That’s a huge criticism of existing work structures, but at the same time it gives me hope, because it’s a challenge for industrial psychology and the technical sciences.

To sum up: what would the future world of work ideally look like?

We have to raise our aspirations for a good life. That means we need better products and more humane services. And we have to realise that it can only be done through meaningful jobs offering demanding, imagination-stirring tasks and excellent technology; for those, it seems likely we’ll have to look beyond Microsoft and SAP.

THEO WEHNER is Professor of Industrial and Organisational Psychology at ETH Zurich. Following studies in psychology and sociology at the University of Münster, he obtained a PhD from the University of Bremen and also acquired post-doctoral qualifications (“Habilitation”) there in 1986. From 1989 to 1997 he was Professor of Industrial Psychology at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH). A combined quantitative and qualitative empirical approach plays a central role in his research, but is embedded in operational business life at all times and implemented in close cooperation with both management and labour.