Every few years we fall into the same old argument: No, machines will not steal your job.

They might take this job you are doing right now, but they will not take away every job.

The other day a friend of mine told me a story that very much illustrates this. He works in a company that trades chemical products internationally. Clients send requests through an integrated CRM and he arranges the delivery.

Unfortunately, he pays too much attention to the news cycle. The other day he confessed to me he’s afraid that A.I. will take his job.

“It is the end for me,” he said, “What I do is automatizable.”

It is true. One part of his work is automatizable. Some days he just takes requests through a system and log them in another. He’s a cog in the machine already.

But that’s not all he does. He spends his day surveilling logistics, verifying that no incidents happen and all clients are happy. But incidents happen, and when they do, his creativity kicks in.

So, the story:

“We need 5 tons of acetic acid in Munich, day after tomorrow!” the sales guy told him.

He bit his lip. How many times had he fought the sales team for accepting impossible schedules?

“This is a highly explosive product,” he answered, “Our provider is in Spain. The amount of paperwork we need, even if the driver takes the long way around Switzerland. And who would do the trip? The guys at FriendlyTruck are all booked!”

“Make it happen. This is a very important client,” he hung the phone.

Looking around he thought hard, until a lightbulb switched: there’s a ship fully packed with acid coming into Hamburg every month. They must have some stock there. He called his friends, and alas, they had almost 3 tons of acid still available.

“Besides,” they told him, “we only sell 1 tonne per week.”

Still he had to take it from Hamburg to Munich. He had little truck contacts in Germany, but he knew of a French guy that was already downloading his tank of acetone in that same yard. Unfortunately, acetone and acetic acid are incompatible. This means, if a truck has carried acetone, you need to clean the thing thoroughly first, which itself takes a whole day, and even then the truck would only be eligible to carry acetic acid a week later.

He looked some more, until he found a guy that was going to carry acetone from Hamburg to Warsaw that very day. The last piece of the puzzle.

He found the number and called him. A deep Polish voice answered. They mumbled for a while, but it was futile: the trucker only spoke Polish! After a while, somehow, my friend managed to tell the driver to reach for his phone and reconfirm the trip (while they were trying to understand each other, he had already changed it). It worked.

“Ah… Okay, okay. Monachium. Munchen, Munchen…” he said. This Polish trucker would load 2 tons of acetic acid to Munich (which was the maximum he dared borrow without asking first).

My friend sighed. Hard part over! All that was left was to tie loose ends.

He called the French trucker downloading acetone. He told him to stop the download, and start loading up acetone again: his new job was to go to Warsaw with a full tank.

He then called the guys at the yard. They were well stocked with acetone luckily, but the acetic acid was low.

“Next sale is in a few days. That’s going to leave us dry. Not to mention if we make another small sale… When is next ship coming in?”

“I can get you a truck with 2 tons of acetic acid by next week,” he assured them. In fact he had arranged a truck with 5 tons: 2 for the guys at Hamburg and the remaining 3 for the very important client.

So he lastly called the sales guy who had started all this.

“I got you a truck with 2 tons of acetic acid going out of Hamburg yard in a few hours. The other 3 will arrive next week.”

“It’ll have to do. Thanks, you are a miracle worker.”

So, what is the moral of this story?

It seems that my friend still plays somewhat of a creative role. At least this part of the job won’t be automatized, right?

Well, no, that is not the full picture. With A.I., who knows, maybe they will be able to automatize this too. Even more so now that my friend has “discovered” this relationship of providers. He might as well be teaching the machines of the future how to solve complex problems.

No. There is still an element my friend missed in his story, related to the very important client. Why did the sales guy take the deal? He was making a bet, sure, but there is a deeper truth. If he did not take it, and if he routinely does not take “hot” deals, he, or perhaps the company itself, would fall out of business.

Why? The market has become more competitive, the customers more capricious. In the past it might have been rare to receive requests more urgent than a week, or a month. Imagine before the internet, and telephones, when international travel was a high risk adventure: shipments arrived when they arrived, if they arrived at all.

Now the market has sophisticated. With more technology, companies like the very important client not only exist, but take their whole competitive advantage from being flexible. The high availability of stock allows whole industries to exist, and companies to make (previously) absurd requests, like the one in the story. Can a machine solve these absurd requests? Sure! Indeed the more, the better, for they enable more companies to benefit from this flexibility, allowing us to think broader and deeper on actual human needs.

It is unsurprising that my friend tells me: those parts of his job that are automatizable are the ones he most hates doing. Why not automatize them? And free all his mental energy to solve complex problems like the one he just solved. The truth is, if he becomes good at it, the complex incidents will multiply, not reduce. Imagine all lost deals that the sales team have to turn down because they are just unfeasable. Or the amount of deals that clients don’t bother raising the phone for, because they are deemed impossible.

Machines will not steal every job, because there will always be human needs, and where there’s a need, there’s a job. Needs will increase, today’s luxury is tomorrow’s basic need, and the market will demand more contextual thinking, that which machines are not fit for.

“But A.I. is definitively a game-changer,” some say.

To this I like to point out, as Nassim Taleb puts in his book “Black Swan”: we are very bad at predicting the future. What we think won’t have any efect, does, and what we think will have great effect, doesn’t. Or at least not in the way we think.

Who would have thought the Internet to have such an effect? Or the steam engine? Or the printing press? And on the other hand, where’s our flying cars? Our interplanetary civilization? If you would have taken bets back in the 70’s on who would lead innovation 50 years hence, NASA would top the chart, and you’d be pressed to find anyone putting money on one William Gates and his friend Paul Allen, working overnight out of some garage in Albuquerque.

Who knows what A.I. will bring? How will it look like in 50 years? What type of comapnies will it enable, what needs will it satisfy? Or will it stay relevant at all, like our flying cars?

I am not enamoured with technology, nor do I dread it. I was not around in the 70’s to speculate, but I’m here now to take bets: if history’s worth anything, chances are it will be a net positive, and we will live in a better world because of it. Those who follow too closely the news cycle would do well to remember that we don’t live in a sci-fi movie.