Assessing the future of work: Dick Samson, a researcher and thinker about the changing demographics of the workplace, talks about automation's long-term threat to employment and what steps could be taken now to address it.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Workplace - Interview

How will the nature of work change in the coming decades? No one really knows, of course, but the advent of the information age suggests that more and more work will be done by machines, and less by their human masters. Already, much of the lingering crisis in job creation is being blamed on surging productivity-companies just don't need as many people to get the job done.

Richard W. Samson--he goes by Dick--is looking at this issue intently. As president of the EraNova (its tag line is "a new era through mind extension") Institute in Mountain Lakes, N.J., Samson has written a number of provocative white papers on the way automation and offshoring are imperiling the future of U.S. knowledge workers--including many in finance.

EraNova (www.eranova.com) is essentially a one-man shop, Samson says, with a few "loosely aligned" people working in telecommunications and related areas. Samson himself a lean, well-spoken man with a shock of white hair over wire-frame glasses that gives him a distinctly professorial air--has worked in recent years with companies like AT&T Corp., Cisco Systems, and CMG plc. Prior to that, he says, he worked in publishing and training, as well as for IBM Corp. in internal areas like decision analysis.

Samson contends that controlling the impact of automation on workers will require a large dose of corporate leadership, and minimal input from government. "I believe that America's corporate leaders will support intelligent changes in the playing field that do not disadvantage them with foreign competitors." Companies could tell government what they need, and government could then "tweak" solutions, he says.

A dozen or so people around the country, affiliated with corporations and universities, are allied with Samson in addressing these issues, he says. Currently, there's no funding, but an institute advisory board member is disseminating EraNova's research to the leading presidential candidates, asking them to think about it in terms of formulating their own economic plans.

Samson says he's alternately pessimistic and optimistic about companies' response to these issues and their apparent understanding of what is at stake--though he believes that most American corporations are led by "really good people" who "want to do what's right for their employees, their community and the country."

Samson sat down recently for an interview with Financial Executive. Here is an edited transcript of the conversation:

FE: How long have these job trends been in place--long before the bubble of the late 1990s? Were they accelerated by the bubble?

Samson: We have technology, particularly information technology, following the same kinds of trends that we had in the development of manufacturing. Heavy industry has fallen from about 40 percent [of the workforce] to about 17 percent, and showing signs of going down to about 2 percent, the same way farming has. Now, we've got the service sector with 83 percent of the...