Peter Murphy - Auto-Industrialism

Peter Murphy 2017

First published 2017

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951859

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-4739-6171-5

eISBN 978-1-4739-9883-4

Editor: Natalie Aguilera

Editorial assistant: Delayna Spencer

Production editor: Vanessa Harwood

Marketing manager: Sally Ransom

Cover design: Jen Crisp

Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed in the UK

We have entered a period of momentous structural change.1 For those old enough to remember it, the shift we are experiencing is like that of the 1970s. Then we saw the onset of the post-industrial age. Mass manufacturing industries in the leading economies contracted. Parts of them were exported abroad to China and elsewhere. The number of well-paid, blue-collar industrial jobs shrank dramatically. Lesser-paying service jobs expanded along with white-collar, professional and para-professional work. The latter was fuelled by an expanding public sector. The government-education-and-health slice of the economy swelled. Theories of human capital and public goods boomed in popularity. This was accompanied in the private sector by the growth of media and communications industries and the information and knowledge economy. Information technology (IT) became pervasive. Computers appeared everywhere. Processes and products were digitized and networked.

The post-industrial world, which we became familiar with, is now itself beginning to disappear. The shift to a markedly different social model auto-industrialism is underway. The signs of this are all around us. Go to any big supermarket retailer today and you will see arrays of self-service check-outs. The auto-industrial era is an age of self-service. It is marked by a rising tide of do-it-yourself (DIY), automated and robotic processes. There are continuities with the post-industrial age. The ubiquitous computer remains ubiquitous. However some things are noticeably different. Auto-industrialism does part of what post-industrialism did. But it automates it. Customer-facing retail jobs were standard post-industrial fare. These are now being replaced by automated online purchasing even at bricks-and-mortar locations.

In the United Kingdom, between 2000 and 2015, 750,000 net jobs were lost in manufacturing and 338,000 in wholesale and retail. Two million jobs in that country (60 percent of the current retail workforce) are predicted to disappear from the wholesale and retail sector by 2036.2 In-store shoppers increasingly prefer to interact with computers that provide information to assist their purchases rather than a sales clerk.3 Instead of being told by a sales assistant that an item is not in stock, machine-mediated retailing can sell customers goods that are not in-store but can be ordered for later pickup or delivery. The phenomenon of click-and-collect goods is on the rise with purchases made online and collected by the customer later from a physical location.4 The American retailer Macys is adapting their chain of stores to function as pickup points for online purchasing. Supporting this in the background are computer algorithms that manage the retailers inventory.5 Eventually delivery by concierge-style sole contractors and then drones, driverless cars and other robotic means will complete the online purchase system. A pilot is presently being conducted in the United Kingdom of knee-high, shopping cart-sized delivery droids to service the last mile of retail delivery (which currently represents 30 to 40 percent of business delivery costs).6