Coming of the robots, reshaping our society in ways difficult to foresee

Summary:   Next in a series looking at one of the great social challenges of the 21st century.

Journalists obsess over shockwaves — high probability, low impact scenarios.  So many shockwaves of advocates willing to make outlandishly exaggerated statements with God-like certainty — often by people with a financial interest in study or mitigation of that danger.

Meanwhile large shocks inexorably approach, with little attention.  With little study of their timing or effects.  Such as peak oil, often discussed on this website. This posts discusses another example:  automation, with the resulting unemployment of a large fraction of our workforce.  It’s coming, as robots grow more sophisticated every year …

• sensors (gps, vision),
• ability to understand and speak using simple grammer,
• connectivity to other devices (e.g., automatic expense recording and billing systems — as with tolls and parking),
• dexterity (manipulative skills), and
• semi-intelligence (reasoning within a limited domain).

Like a drunk playing Russian roulette, we’re confident that our success with the first two waves of automation (agriculture and manufacturing) means that we need make no effort to prepare for the next wave.

Even if computers never become truly intelligent, surely machines are likely to become far more capable in terms of their ability to perform a relatively narrow range of tasks. The reality is that a substantial fraction of the routine, specialized jobs held by average people — including many people with college degrees — simply do not really require the full intellectual breadth of a human being. This is the reason that a lot of jobs are boring. If computers can already beat the best chess players in the world, isn’t it likely that they will also soon be able to perform many routine jobs? In fact, I think there are good reasons to expect that machines may begin to approach this more specialized level of “intelligence” within a decade or two.

Since many of the people who work in fields like artificial intelligence and robotics are talking about the future prospects for these technologies on a fairly regular basis, I assumed that a similar discussion must be going on among economists. Surely, the economists are thinking ahead. If machines get smarter and start doing many of our jobs, then the economists will have a plan in place. At least they will have thought about it; they’ll have some good suggestions. Right?

Well, no. It turns out that while technologists are actively thinking about, and writing books about, intelligent machines, the idea that technology will ever truly replace a large fraction of the human workforce and lead to permanent, structural unemployment is, for the majority of economists, almost unthinkable. For mainstream economists, at least in the long run, technological advancement always leads to more prosperity and more jobs. This is seen almost as an economic law. Anyone who challenges this “law of economics” is called a “neo-Luddite.” This is not a compliment.

Martin Ford, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (2009) — The ebook is free.

Quo bono?  Who will benefit?

Without preparation the rewards from automation will go to the rich — the upper 5% and especially the top 1% — who own almost the entire capital stock of the US.  This has happened during the past generation, a major factor in the growing unequal distribution of income and wealth.  If this continues, American workers will bear all the resulting suffering.  This was how the first chapters of the industrial revolutions played out in the 18th and 19th centuries.

With a little time and few drinks any group can imagine solutions to the mass unemployment from automation.  Implementing any of these will require imagination and social cohesion on a level we seldom display in times other than war.  Saying it will work out well in the end might lead to large-scale social disruption — well-deserved by our fecklessness.

“In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if, in tempestous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”
— John Maynard Keynes in A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)

How might this play out?

If everybody shares to some degree in the benefits of automation we might have a wonderful future.  Perhaps leading to a material utopia, or the Singularity first described by Vernor Vinge (Marooned in Real Time, 1986).  But there are other paths, well-worth and easy paths down which we might slide.

Sabotage was adopted by the General Federation of Labor of France in 1897 as a recognized weapon in their method of conducting fights on their employers. But sabotage as an instinctive defense existed long before it was ever officially recognized by any labor organization.
— “Sabotage: The conscious withdrawal of the workers’ industrial efficiency“, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Industrial Workers of the World, October 1916

Luddites {were} organized bands of 19th-century English handicraftsmen who rioted for the destruction of the textile machinery that was displacing them. … {They} were generally masked and operated at night. Their leader, real or imaginary, was known as King Ludd, after a probably mythical Ned Ludd. They eschewed violence against persons and often enjoyed local support. In 1812 a band of Luddites was shot down under the orders of a threatened employer named Horsfall (who was afterward murdered in reprisal). The government of Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of Liverpool, instituted severe repressive measures culminating in a mass trial at York in 1813, which resulted in many hangings and transportations. Similar rioting in 1816 was caused by the depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars; but the movement was soon ended by vigorous repression and reviving prosperity.
— From the Encyclopædia Britannica

In legend, the term sabotage comes from the early days of the first industrial revolution (perhaps as early as the 17th century), when workers would throw their sabots (wooden shoes) into the gears of the textile looms to break the cogs.

The evolution to our modern capitalistic system includes many periods of labor violence.  All unsuccessful, mostly crushed by military force.  We had the late 19th century labor wars, mostly crushed by the National Guard, US Army, and mercs (i.e., Pinkertons — the 19th century Blackwater), as in the 1892 Homestead Strike, the 1894 Pullman Strike, and the Colorodo Labor Wars of 1903-05.  More recently:

• The 1931 UMW strike in Harlan Country, a gunfight in which 3 deputies and 1 miner died (about which an excellent documentary was made).
• “Bloody Thursday” in the the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, 2 strikers killed.
• Remington-Rand strike of 1936-37
• The Memorial Day massacre of 1937 — Chicago Police killed 10 demonstrators during a US Steel strike.

Until the New Deal victories by labor, which might be an aberration due to special circumstances.

It’s already happening

Now for the sad news:  the recession has pushed corporations to take the radical steps necessary to implement the next phase of automation.  Economists see the resulting structural unemployment, but their theories pervent them from understanding what they see.

More on this on another day.

For more information

• Click here to see a graphic perspective on robots and automation.
• Executive Summary of the World Robotics 2010 report, International Federation of Robotics
• “Robots of the Rising Sun“, Jennifer Robertson, The American Interest, Autumn 2010

Other posts about robots and automation

1. 4GW: A solution of the first kind – Robots!, 8 April 2008
2. The coming big increase in structural unemployment, 7 August 2010
3. The coming Robotic Nation, 28 August 2010
4. The coming of the robots, reshaping our society in ways difficult to foresee, 22 September 2010
5. Economists grapple with the first stage of the robot revolution, 23 September 2012
6. The Robot Revolution arrives, and the world changes, 20 April 2012