La Repubblica recently carried the news that the French government had introduced a point system on driver’s licenses, as has now been done in Italy, and in the course of one year the number of accidents had fallen, with fewer fatalities. Excellent news. But the president of the Groupement National des Carrossiers Réparateurs, an association of mechanics, having said that as a citizen he was of course pleased about the fall in the death rate, nevertheless, as a mechanic, he had to report that it was causing hardship to his members. Fewer accidents, fewer repairs. And it appears that as a result of this major economic blight, not only are mechanics in distress and asking for state assistance, but some are even urging less strenuous controls. In short, if the report is accurate, they’re asking for fewer fines so that more cars get damaged.
I’m not suggesting for one moment that they are after more deaths, since those killed in road accidents don’t, as a rule, take their cars to be repaired, and the next of kin ship them straight to the junkyard. Yet a few good collisions with no fatalities and limited injuries, and the car not being transformed into a coffin and written off, wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Such reports shouldn’t surprise us. Technological innovation, progress, has always produced unemployment, and it all began with the eighteenth-century weavers who smashed mechanical looms for fear of ending up without work. The advent of the taxi must have been disastrous for coachmen. When I was a child, I remember old Pietro being called with his buggy to take my family and our baggage to the railroad station. Public autos arrived a few years later, and he was too old to get a license and take up a new job as a taxi driver. But the pace of innovation at that time was fairly slow, and Pietro would have been close to retirement when he found himself jobless.
Today things are more hurried. I suppose longer life expectancy has caused difficulties for funeral directors and cemetery staff, except that the process has been gradual, and by the time they realized there were fewer sixty-year-olds to bury, they must already have been burying eighty-year-olds who hadn’t died at seventy. Jobs in this line of work—thanks to that mother of all syllogisms, “All men are mortal”—should never be in short supply. If tomorrow scientists discover, perhaps not the secret of immortality but a drug that could suddenly extend the average life to 120 years, we might see funeral directors on the streets demanding financial assistance from the government.
The problem is that in an ever-increasing number of cases the acceleration of innovation will bring ruin to whole categories of labor. Just think of the 1980s crisis of typewriter repairers. Either they were youngsters bright enough to become computer experts, or they found themselves without work.
The challenge is therefore to provide professional training to ensure rapid reemployment. When mechanical looms were introduced, a weaver couldn’t become a mechanical loom maker overnight. But machines today are more or less universal; their physical structure is far less important than the software programs that make them work; so a specialist capable of creating the program that operates a washing machine could fairly easily retrain to work on the program that regulates the dashboard of a car.
To deal with the prospect of accelerated reemployment, a large part of professional training will have to be intellectual development: learning about software more than about the machine’s hardware, its structure, its physical components.
And so, rather than thinking about schooling that offers only two options, university or work, there ought to be an education system that ends just with qualifications in the humanities or sciences, because whoever ends up becoming, for example, a sanitation worker will need the intellectual training necessary to plan and program his or her own reemployment.
This is not an abstract democratic and egalitarian ideal. It’s the same logic as that of working in a computerized society, which requires the same education for all and is modeled on the highest, not the lowest, standard. Otherwise, innovation will always and only produce unemployment.
2003