Artificial Ignorance

I started work in September 1982 for the princely sum of 20 punts a week. That wasn’t a lot of money even then but the job was in an Accountancy office and it held out the tantalizing promise of riches to come. When I turned up for the interview for that job the partner tried to temper my expectation by letting me know that they planned to cut back on recruitment due to their imminent acquisition of two IBM computers. 

I got the job anyway and started on the same day as the shiny new computers as well as the two extra staff that had been hired to input data into them. They also had a dedicated room to themselves with air-conditioning, which was as rare in rural Ireland then as divorce, gay marriage or abortion services.

  

This was my first encounter with automation and the false promise that it was going to eliminate 90% of jobs. When you read about automation and robotics, you’ll notice that Accounting jobs are usually the first mentioned. There is an assumption that everything we bean counters do can be programmed and run instantaneously. I’ve been hearing this argument for 36 years now and every company I’ve worked for has thought they were the first to realise that automation could cut job numbers. The truth is that any organisation worth its salt would try to be more efficient and hiring accountants is actually the smartest way of achieving this.

  

My current boss is the latest to think that he discovered automation. I work in an IT team these days, surrounded by the sort of nerds who make us Accountants look like rock stars. He sent me an email he’d received from KPMG advertising robotic software that could cut accounting teams by 90%. Given that KPMG is an accounting firm, this is like turkeys sending out an email with roasting recipes.

What my boss doesn’t appreciate is that the work Accountants do is not an automated process. My first five years in accountancy were spent trying to minimise the profits that client’s reported, so that they paid the least amount of tax possible. It wasn’t the most ethical thing I’ve ever done and I’d like to say it was mostly legal, but it was creative. This often involved helping farmers to explain how they had bought lots of cows but hadn’t sold any and didn’t have any left at the end of the year. That was my introduction to bovine diseases and the number of fictitious cow skeletons there are in top fields in Ireland.

I once had a Tax Inspector call me to say that I hadn’t reported income from the pub that a farmer client owned. I replied that while he might have an old shack on his farm, he only opened it once a year for his family in order to keep the licence. The Tax Inspector laughed and said the one day he opened this year must have been the occasion that U2 were playing and that there were 200 cars in the car park that night. I’d like to see a robot handle that conversation.

I moved to London after that and got a job with an Insurance company that had launched several small companies in the wake of the Financial Services explosion in the UK in the 1980s. I was tasked with the monthly reporting of these companies, most of which were technically insolvent and were leaking cash like a drunk sailor on shore leave.

My job was to present a rosy picture and to go against my previous training by inflating profits. This meant hiding expenses and reporting income that wasn’t exactly earned. I won’t go into the detail for legal reasons. But when I moved on from this job, I just hope that my successor could make sense of my creative ramblings.

I spent the next twenty years valuing investment funds. My role there was to find a way of covering up the mistakes that others, including the automated systems we used, made. This involved a lot of creativity, from hiding documents to trying to confuse auditors with bullshit.

All in all, I think Accountants are safe for a while yet. At least until they can write a program that can lie and cheat. Which comes to think of it, maybe they have. Google tells you they don’t read your emails anymore, but can still provide three helpful suggested replies at the bottom of each Gmail. And if you’ve ever used google maps, it tends to take you through industrial estates rather than in a straight line, as though it has shares in petrol companies and wants to maximise your fuel consumption.

Automation is tied to artificial intelligence, an oxymoron that is up there with British Intelligence and Civil War. I hear a lot of guff about artificial intelligence and how the big tech companies are at the forefront of its implementation. Despite this, Facebook effectively got Donald Trump elected while Mark Zuckerberg is clearly a Democrat and Google will make sure you get an advertisement for a product immediately after you’ve bought it. People tell me that this is because Google knows that you’ve searched for flights but doesn’t know that you’ve booked and paid for one, despite the fact that the airline has sent you a confirmation Gmail, which as I mentioned above, they clearly read.

Every generation puts a hero up the pop charts. And every generation thinks it has cracked the secret of work. Yet there are more people working today than when the spinning jenny was invented. Then again, nobody worked in marketing or web development back then and this is the point. As one job gets automated, humanity finds a way to create another. We might all end up as hairdressers, pet psychics and YouTube contributors but all of these people will need Accountants to creatively boost or hide profits. I’ve got 12 years to retirement. I think I’m safe.