Machines can replace millions of bureaucrats
WHEN it comes to robots displacing humans from the job market, government bureaucrats are generally not what springs to mind. The recent McKinsey report on the future of jobs estimates the automation potential of administrative jobs at just 39 per cent, far less than the 73 per cent potential for accommodation and food services.
And yet the public sector is one of the biggest potential arenas for such displacement — and one in which most people wouldn’t mind seeing more automation. The reason it’s barely happening now is largely, and predictably, an absence of political will.
Since 2013, Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have done seminal work on automation risks for jobs, quoted by most studies on the subject. Their 2016 work with Craig Holmes and a team of Citibank employees listed some of the most automation-endangered professions:
In some countries, some of the people in these jobs — such as postal employees — are public sector workers. But government clerks who do predictable, rule-based, often mechanical work also are in danger of displacement by machines. In a recent collaboration with Deloitte UK, Profs. Osborne and Frey estimated that about a quarter of public sector workers are employed in administrative and operative roles which have a high probability of automation. In the UK, they estimated some 861,000 such jobs could be eliminated by 2030, creating 17 billion pounds (RM96.3 billion) in savings for the taxpayer. These would include people like underground train operators — but mainly local government paper pushers.
This week, Reform, the London-based think tank dedicated to improving public service efficiency, published a paper on automating the public sector. It applied methodology developed by Osborne and Frey to the UK’s central government departments and calculated that almost 132,000 workers could be replaced by machines in the next 10 to 15 years, using currently known automation methods. Only 20 per cent of government employees do strategic, cognitive work that requires human thinking — at least for now, while artificial intelligence is as imperfect as it is. Most of the rest are what the Reform report calls the “frozen middle” — levels of hierarchy where bureaucrats won’t budge without approval from above.
Almost all British government departments have 10 employee grades or more. The department for environment, food and rural affairs has 13. Most of the middle-level tasks are routine and rigidly regulated and motivation is low: Only 38 per cent of middlelevel bureaucrats say they feel good about what they do. In the
Government clerks who do predictable, rulebased, often mechanical work also are in danger of displacement by machines. In a recent collaboration with Deloitte UK, Profs. Osborne and Frey estimated that about a quarter of public sector workers are employed in administrative and operative roles which have a high probability of automation.
UK, the average civil servant takes eight sick days a year, while a private sector worker takes five. In the last two decades public sector spending rose by an average 3.1 per cent a year, about 16 times faster than productivity.
The Reform report discusses how this frozen middle could be thawed.
The general idea is to automate information flows and organise remaining employees into project teams that may not even need to be managed. That’s not necessarily a good idea, though many companies in the tech sector — Netflix, GitHub, Zappos — work like this: Informal hierarchies that arise in such an environment can be even more stifling than formal ones. But if work creation is not the goal and efficiency is, the optimal organisational forms will suggest themselves as routine tasks are automated away.
There’s also automation potential for so-called front line jobs where bureaucrats interact with the public. Many people don’t want any human contact in these situations, most people want less of it, and nobody enjoys dealing with government services. — Bloomberg