If the techno-pessimists are right and robots are set to take all the jobs, shouldn’t employment in Amazon warehouses be plummeting right now? After all, Amazon’s sorting and fulfillment centers have been automated at a rapid pace, with robotic technologies now being integrated into almost every facet of the process. (Just watch the video below to see it all in action.)

And yet according to this Wall Street Journal story by Laura Stevens, Amazon is looking to immediately fill 50,000 new jobs, which would mean that its U.S. workforce “would swell to around 300,000, compared with 30,000 in 2011.”  According to the article, “Nearly 40,000 of the promised jobs are full-time at the company’s fulfillment centers, including some facilities that will open in the coming months. Most of the remainder are part-time positions available at Amazon’s more than 30 sorting centers.”

How can this be? Shouldn’t the robots have eaten all those jobs by now?

The reality is that we suffer from a serious poverty of imagination when it comes to thinking about the future, and future job opportunities in particular. “One thing automation alarmists sometimes miss is that the simplistic ‘machines steal jobs’ story tells an incomplete tale,” observes James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute. “How machines can complement what humans do and create increased demand should not be overlooked when evaluating the rise of the robots. Yet it seems like it often is,” he notes.

Bank tellers are the paradigmatic example. With the rise of ATMs a few decades ago, many thought the days of bank tellers were numbered. But research by economist James Bessen of Boston University shows that we have more bank tellers today than we did 40 years ago. (See chart below). How’s that? Because once the ATMs could handle the menial tasks of counting and distributing money, the tellers were freed up to do other things.

This is a part of the story of technological change that is often ignored, as Pethokoukis suggests. Old jobs and skills are indeed often replaced by mechanization and new technological processes. But that in turn opens the door to people to take on new opportunities — often in new sectors and new firms, but sometimes even within the same industries and companies. And because human needs and wants are essentially infinite, this process just goes on and on and on as we search for new and better ways of doing things. And that’s how, in the long run, robots and automation are actually employment-enhancing rather than employment-reducing. (For a historical overview of this process, see this paper on “Does Productivity Growth Threaten Employment?” by David Autor and Anna Salomons as well as Autor’s 2015 paper, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Also see this McKinsey report on “Four fundamentals of workplace automation.” from 2015.)

Of course, in the short-run, that process of creative destruction isn’t always pretty. In fact, it can be gut-wrenching for some professions and workers. But the long arc of history, this is how progress happens.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Apple iPhone. With all the headlines being written today about how the device changed the world forever, it is easy to forget that before its launch, plenty of experts scoffed at the idea that Steve Jobs and Apple had any chance of successfully breaking into the seemingly mature mobile phone market.

After all, those were the days when BlackBerry, Palm, Motorola, and Microsoft were on everyone’s minds. Perhaps, then, it wasn’t so surprising to hear predictions like these leading up to and following the launch of the iPhone:

• In December 2006, Palm CEO Ed Colligan summarily dismissed the idea that a traditional personal computing company could compete in the smartphone business. “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
• In January 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed off the prospect of an expensive smartphone without a keyboard having a chance in the marketplace as follows: “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.”
• In March 2007, computing industry pundit John C. Dvorak argued that “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone” since “There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.” Dvorak believed the mobile handset business was already locked up by the era’s major players. “This is not an emerging business. In fact it’s gone so far that it’s in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.”

A decade after these predictions were made, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry have been decimated by the rise of Apple as well as Google (which actually purchased Motorola in the midst of it all). And Microsoft still struggles with mobile even though they are still a player in the field. Rarely have Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gales of creative destruction” blown harder than they have in the mobile sector over this 10 year period.

The lesson here is pretty clear. As Yogi Berra once quipped: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But there’s more to it than just that. These mistaken predictions serve as a classic example of those with a static snapshot mentality disregarding the potential for new entry and technological disruption to shake things up. “In dealing with disruptive technologies leading to new markets,” says Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, “researchers and business planners have consistently dismal records.”

This has implications not only for business forecasting but also for public policy, which is notoriously shortsighted when it comes to the potential for new technological innovations to shake up existing markets. Just because you think a particular firm or sector it the proverbial “King of the Hill” one day, it doesn’t mean they will be able to sit on that lofty perch forever. Likewise, policymakers cannot neatly “plan progress” by incessantly intervening in the hope of directing markets and technologies toward some supposedly better end. Picking winners and losers–or even just trying to stimulate more “winners”–will likely end very badly.

In his book,  The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-three Years, the futurist Herman Kahn wisely noted that:

History is likely to write scenarios that most observers would find implausible not only prospectively but sometimes, even in retrospect. Many sequences of events seem plausible now only because they have actually occurred; a man who knew no history might not believe any. Future events may not be drawn from the restricted list of those we have learned are possible; we should expect to go on being surprised.

But we can only “expect to go on being surprised” by leaving plenty of breathing room for the evolution of markets and technology. While all social and economic experiments are accompanied by a great deal of unpredictability and disruption, history indicates that most of those experiments will result in greater progress and prosperity–just as the iPhone did. But developments such as these are almost impossible to predict or plan beforehand. We have to get the environment for innovation right and then let creative minds work their magic.

As I noted in my recent paper, “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC,” every time a media merger is proposed we hear all sorts of silly Chicken Little predictions of impending doom. Among the more entertaining claims we hear are conspiracy theories about supposed nefarious schemes to take over the media universe and control our minds,  predictions of the death of journalism or democracy, or just good ol’ fashion screw-the-consumer price hikes. But, as I showed in my paper, those predictions have always proven to be bunk once the historical record is in–which usually only takes a few years. While most media mergers do end in misery–it’s for the merging firms and their shareholders, not the public. Unforeseen technological innovations and expanding media marketplace options typically doom most media mergers, while the viewing and listening public enjoys the fruits of continued marketplace evolution.

But the critics never acknowledge any of this. And, sadly, history repeats. The media worrywarts just keep mouthing the same lines and conveniently avoid any reference to their past predictions. No one bothers looking back and trying to match up those past predictions with present day facts. I’m out to change that.  I am going to attempt to keep a running inventory all the Chicken Little predictions about the Comcast-NBC Universal deal so that, a few years from now, we can look back and see how well those predictions match up with reality.  I suspect that, as was true of those earlier case studies, reality will look quite different than the rhetoric we are hearing today.

To kick things off, here are some rather outlandish comments from someone who should know better — Dan Gillmor, author of the excellent 2006 book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, which I have cited quite favorably in much of my own work through the years.  But when it comes to the Comcast-NBCU deal, Gillmor has gone off the deep end in an essay entitled, “Comcast-NBC: The Road Toward Control Over What We Create.” He argues:

A Comcast-NBC combination is brazenly anti-competitve and anti-democratic. It would give one company far too much ownership over not just professionally produced media but also the ways media consumers can receive it. Worse, if approved, it could mark the tipping point in Big Media’s push to take control over the Internet itself. That’s where we need to focus our attention.

But wait, there’s more…

it will be in Comcast’s financial interest to clamp down as much as possible on Internet data use when it conflicts with its cable-TV business, which is to say on a constant basis.

Oh my. This is quite a scary story. A Hollywood script could be born of all this! But, then again, Comcast-NBCU would quash that script and forever bury it from our sight, right?

I fear Gillmor has been drinking up some of the “perfect control” fantasies bandied about by his Harvard Berkman Center colleagues Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, which I have documented here before. These guys have claimed that a variety of digital players–AOL in the ’90s and Apple today–would crush our digital liberties and snuff out competition and dissent.

These tales are all fiction, of course. In my paper, I document just how quickly the much-ballyhooed AOL-Time Warner merger fell apart. When AOL-Time Warner announced their mega-merger, critics forecast “servitude,” “ministries of propaganda,” and “new totalitarianisms.” Just two years after the deal was announced, AOL-Time Warner had lost over $100 billion in shareholder value and Time Warner decided to drop AOL from its name altogether. And AOL is now being spun off altogether. So much for “perfect control.”

But what about Gillmor’s claim that Comcast will clamp down on all content that conflicts with its cable TV business model?  Rubbish. If they were going to do that, wouldn’t we have seen some evidence by now? And good luck trying even if they really wanted to do so.  It’s impossible for them to lock down content flows. There’s always another way for information and content to flow in our modern media marketplace. Indeed, Gillmor completely undercuts his own argument on this point when noting:

Keep in mind that Comcast wouldn’t be the first company to have this kind of vertical content and distribution structure. Time Warner owns some cable franchises along with CNN and other media properties; Cablevision has its own content business. Phone companies have some projects under way, too.

Yes, Dan, and what do those experiments tell us?!   Have you been subjected to some sort of sadistic mind control by the nefarious media overlords who own both content and conduit?  Or did you somehow just avoid the brain-washing because you have access to super-secret information sources outside their control? Please, do tell us. I am dying to know the “truth” that our wicked media overlords are keeping from us!

Sorry to be so snarky, but I am just really tired of this nonsense.  There has been no “takeover” over the media marketplace or our minds by these media companies.  Hell, these media companies can’t even figure out how to tie their own digital shoelaces most days of the week. They are scrambling to find something– anything–that works to counter to tsunami of digital devices, online options, and so on, that they were largely unprepared for. Mergers and alliances are one response to this storm, but there is no guarantee they will pan out. Most don’t. But, again, they typically don’t work out for the companies and their shareholders; the public largely ignores their pain and continues to benefit from a marketplace of rapidly expanding options and alternatives.

Anyway, please help me continue to document claims such as these so I can build a record and then match it up with reality later down the road.  It’s important that public policy be based on facts, not fanaticism.