The Robots of Labor Day
Many fear of robots taking our jobs. But I say on Labor Day celebrate that robots make labor more valuable & could usher in a new age of prosperity & flourishing!
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Lets take an historical walk shall we? Did the steam engine end shipping? Did the tractor end farming? Did automated cow milking end dairy farming? Did the automobile end travel?
What we should be fearing is those who would end automation in fear of losing their jobs. I like this hypothetical example: Suppose the US had gone entirely socialist after the Civil War. Imagine a young Thomas Edison having to approach the Ministry of Science and Invention with his light bulb idea only to have it crushed under the weight of the oil lamp and candlestick unions to save their jobs. If poor Thomas made a fuss he'd find himself on the hand pea shucking line in a poorly lit agricultural warehouse. Later he would be joined by Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford for attempting to disrupt other "employment opportunities".
OK, I'll share one since you mentioned spread sheets. In the fall of 1973 I was working for a large corporation in a tiny, but brand new, research department experimenting with our custom built microprocessor system to perform some rather simple process monitoring tasks on injection molding machines. It was based on the fairly new Motorola 6800 chip set and we designed our own boards and wrote all our own code in assembly language. Anyway, I was young at the time and was with the company for a little more than a year and was quite enamored by this innovative little computer (I was also a Star Trek fan and excitedly thought "Here we go and I'm part of it!"). I got an idea I took to our management and suggested we modify the process monitor board into a table top computer and write programs so the accountants can have their own machines to track inventory and other data and secretaries can type letters and forms on a CRT (that's Cathode Ray Tube to you young folks, which now days is called a monitor) and won't need to fool with white-out when they make a mistake. Yes, I described a computer based spread sheet and word processor before they were officially invented. Managements reply was: "Nobody is going to spend that much money on a glorified calculator and the company isn't going to spend what it would take to make one". Yeah, at the time a Motorola 6800 chip set cost over $200 so I felt I understood what they were saying. Also, inexpensive mass storage for such an endeavor would have been a tough problem to overcome at the time. Apple was born in a garage a few years later when the chip set price was about $25, Radio Shack's TRS80 a few years after that when the floppy disk prices came down and the IBM PC came out around 1981. History indicates I had a great idea, but the cost of that tech in '73 wouldn't let it happen at that time.
In Middletown by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, about Muncie, Indiana, and the Ball glass factory, the old craftsmen glassblowers were put out of work. The young men coming in had little interest in glass, per se, but wanted to learn how to operate the machines because knowing that made them more employable in other factories. That was 1929. Fast forward. In a class in Sociology of the Worldplace in 2007, we read about a neighborhood building that had had several businesses in it, and employed more than a few people from the neighborhood. One man said that he made shoes and now was baking bread, but he knew nothing about shoes or bread. He knew the Windows interface. And I agree that that was great for him. I get that.
However, the bakers and cobblers, like the glassblowers, were nonetheless unemployed.
You can say that they should have learned the new technologies. In that I perceive a collectivist fallacy that all people are "equal" because we are interchangeable. I learned Windows. Therefore, you can, too. More deeply, I wanted to, therefore you should want to, also.
I am not advocating that we keep obsolete technologies just so that some people can work at inefficient tasks. I only mix the metaphoric identification that The Invisible Hand is not a Rising Tide.
It is only now in our time, say from Gen-X , that people have been raised in an economic environment where they understand that you cannot have one job for life. We went through that in the 90s. Just as all that Deming quality stuff was blooming, so was down-sizing. The unemployed became entrepreneurs, one way or another.
Myself, I have always been independent, working as a contractor. (Kawasaki above was one or two full time direct employments. The other was 20 years earlier. Both lasted exactly 1 year and 50 weeks.) I also have more than one trade. And I take on new challenges easily and leave old markets behind. But all of that was from having read Atlas Shrugged and the rest as a teenager. In fact, it was a statement from Howard Roark in the The Fountainhead that with, say, only 60 productive years ahead, why would he want to do any other work but what he enjoyed?
As for the people displaced, welfare will take care of some until the system collapses, but I really hope as many as possible will find black market work instead.
1) automating and reducing employee count, or
2) having more things made in China and reducing employee count, or
3) closing
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So-called "robot surgery" is over 30 years old. In 1991-1993, teaching programming to Ford Motor Company electricians for Kawasaki Robotics, I showed a promotional video that included a PUMA robot positioning an instrument for brain surgery. That was a true robot. The Da Vinci seems not to be, but, rather, is only a complex manipulator, a "waldo". A real robot runs a program, and like all computers, they can alter their operation based on inputs and decisions. At the last robot trade show I attended back in 1995, KRI had two of their new robots connected to a vision system solving a Rubik's Cube.
Perhaps robots will enable us to work 20 or 30 hours per week vs. the supposed standard (today) 40 hour week that exists now. That 40 hour week is the result of industrialization, which is a form of robotization (if that is a word).
My father had a really good job in the 1940's working for the railroad. He worked 10 hours per day, 7 days per week and was paid $1 per hour. In 1945 $70 per week was really good pay. When the railroads began to use diesel-electric engines and replaced the coal-fired steam engines, men like him were able to work shorter hours, fewer days, and at higher pay. By the 1950's railroad men had what is now considered normal 40-hour work weeks.
Robots are really just another form of industrialization and I have to think that will be good for us.
Thank you Dr. Hudgins for bringing up this issue.
As for whether someone will always have to 'feed' (maintain, program, etc.), the robots, back in 1964 when I was in ninth grade, a tool and die guy spoke to my class. "Someone has to make the machines," he said. T&D will never be put out of work by automation. He was right... for 20 or 30 years... CAD/CAM systems helped put tool and die people out work. Today we have 3D printing. It is great stuff. Bring it on. But just be cognizant of the fact that the people who benefit from it are not the same ones who are disadvantaged by it. And, yes, no one complained about the loss of T&D jobs, but only because no one noticed, except them.
Well managed businesses do not fail! Companies fail because the people in charge lose focus. They try to live in a past that has moved on and competitors who move with the changes eat them alive.
And that is where lobbyists come in - their job is to convince politicians to lock things where they are so CEOs can stop thinking/working and enjoy the millions they are being paid. RR executives watched truckers take ever larger portions of their businesses and all they did was whine about it being unfair that trucks got to drive on roads someone else paid for while RRs had to maintain their own tracks.
As to individual jobs, we all have to be prepared to continue learning - the world is such that you can't simply freeze everything so that nothing changes (Anthem), it just will not work that way. From what little I know about T&D makers, I think they are skilled craftsmen. If that is right, then they are capable of learning a new skill if that is what is required. We can not reasonably think that we have reached a point where the world will hold steady so that we can stop being aware of what is happening around us.
Given that everyone has an affluent lifestyle, provided by a robotic workforce, only a small number (5%? 10%?) of the population would need to work. These people would work in innovation, thinking up qualitative changes to our environment (which changes would then be implemented by robots). But the rest of the population can still be productive in art, entertainment, and sports.
I predict that most of the population that can be productive will not choose to do so, however. We will probably end up with another 20% or so who are productive but not employed...and the rest of the people will be an audience for life and not participants therein.
Jan
Japan is actively developing and marketing robotic aids for seniors. With the aging of the baby boomers we have to find a way to take care of a lot of people.
There have also been other psychological studies which link the amount of time an infant spends with their mother up to age two has a dramatic effect on their behaviors for the remainders of their lives.
I think we as humans will cease to be humans when we stop caring about our offspring to the point that we attempt to outsource those responsibilities.
Dr.Wizenbaum wrote it in the 60's as a bit of a parody of artificial intelligence. He isn't a big proponent of machine intelligence. He was shocked at how quickly people 'connected' with it. His secretary asked him to leave the room when she was communicating with the program because it was 'private'.
One of my employees worked on a late night airline reservation phone bank when he was in college and there were a number of elderly people who would call in the middle of the night and talk to them because they couldn't sleep. If the call volume was low, the phone bank people would talk to them for a while before gently telling them that they had to get back to work.
So, would an anthropomorphic computer program substitute? I don't know.
However the point comes when the robots are so capable that they can do any job that a human can do, or a majority of humans. At that point there is no job that it is cost effective to pay those people to do.
We will see that point reached in the relatively near future and have to rethink our economic systems to deal with a world of plenty.
I don't like some of the consequences, particularly looking at the possibility that the majority of people will not have jobs but must still live. But reality exists.
Two hundred years ago my father would not be able to trade his labor driving a truck (horse-drawn wagon back then) and selling bread for a house, TV, AC, lots of food and money to raise six kids because his labor was not worth it. Only advances in productivity allowed that.
There is always some work for humans. What about terraforming the planet Mars to make it a habitat for humanity? Yes, robots will be used to design the optimal way to introduce greenhouse gases, seed the planet with organisms to convert CO2 into oxygen, genetically engineer those organisms, etc. and to actually carry out the process. But humans will instruct the robots what they want, feed in cost and value tradeoffs that humans desire, etc. Or, as I recently suggested in a Mars Society speech, we could engineer the environment of Mars to make it suitable for human biology. Or we could engineer human biology to make it suitable for the environment of Mars!
On this last point, as advances in genetic engineering and nanotech extends human longevity and enhances our capacities. 500 will be the new 70 and there will be plenty of time for really long-term projects, with individual humans taking centuries rather than decades perspectives. They will develop goals undreamt of. Robots will assist but humans will conceive and plan.
In any case, humans are the objects of all value and will always have something to do, even with robots.
Up to now the thing that humans could be is more flexible. Robots could handle specific repetitive tasks but many tasks require too much flexibility. And these aren't even sophisticated tasks, for example cleaning a hotel room and making the bed requires a lot of skills that are really hard to automate. But we will automate them.
Most of the task of terraforming Mars necessarily falls to robotic work. In fact, I personally think that humans should focus on building a habitat on the Moon and let the robots build Mars -- at least until they've built the fuel plant, have agriculture working and have built a Hilton. We may need some humans to direct this activity but it will be dozens, not hundreds or thousands. And there will soon be 9 billion of us on the planet.
I do see mass unemployment and keep coming back to the conclusion that the "world of plenty" will involve a middle class "guaranteed annual income" that will allow the bulk of the people to live comfortable lives and buy all the stuff that the 1% that actually makes it all happens create.
As I say, I don't like this idea philosophically, but logic keeps bringing me back to it.
One of the books that I think of in this respect is Asimov's "The Naked Sun" which had the planet of Solaris having 10,000 robots per person. Of course it had an astonishingly low population. Interestingly the predecessor "The Caves of Steel" was dystopic with an overpopulated planet with high crowding a rigid social structure. The population of 8 billion is just over that of today's. We're doing a lot better than he thought we would.
In The Economy of Cities Jane Jacobs contrasted Manchester with Birmingham. To Marx and Engels, Manchester was the epitome of capitalism. The only problem was that it was a one-trick pony: all they did was weave. On the other hand, Birmingham was under-appreciated for its centuries-long tradition of manufacturing diversity. That was why Selgin could sing the praises of the Birmingham button makers who gave us modern coinage.
Just think, someday when they become aware and begin to think on their own...we'll be accused of slavery and they will want social justice...sound kinda like full circle? one more time around.
In reality their is no guarantee that you or I find a viable niche. We simply use our gifts to maximal effect we can. It never turns out well to attempt to legislate reality into something else.
Personally, if I have both my needs met and time on my hands I can think of countless interesting and exciting and some valued by others things to do. I certainly shan't be bored. And note that a highly automated society is a far richer society where, modulo the tremendous cancer of government coercion and predation today, it is increasingly trivial to met all the needs and many of the desires of everyone regardless of whether they have a "job" and without coercion.
the real problem comes when the dinosaurs such as the United Auto Workers can add to the price of vehicles for the cost of employees who have no useful function besides breathing good air and there is Nancy Pellosillyni around to use them to further ruin the economy.
But the whole concept is not rocket science as is most of economics. Absent the window dressing to justify the tuition.
After GM moved its IT department here to Austin, I heard their VP for IT speak to a technology breakfast. He boasted that GM had 14 consecutive profitable quarters for the first time in its history. I was underwhelmed. In 100 years, they never had 3-1/2 good years in a row, even when what was good for General Motors was good for America. GM was founded as the largest capitalization in history at that time. They had some virtues, and virtuous people, but GM, largely (ha, "largely") was always a brontosaurus. Now, Ford, being still controlled by the Ford family was more successful for obvious reasons.
Mostly, it is a matter of culture. The farther you are from Detroit, the more an automotive factory looks like a real workplace. I was in a Ford factory in Detroit where the supervisors really looked like the Production Police. They had blue uniforms with blue ties and radios clipped to their collars. And they walked around just looking for trouble. At Kentucky Truck in Louisville, it was more like the Toyota plant in Lexington. At Twin Cities Assembly, I met a young mechanical engineer and his buddy. Both were union apprentices, and together they had full charge for a little process line, and as long as it worked, no cared how they did it. I never saw supervisor. In fact, at Kentucky Truck, if I wanted a foreman, I had to go find one or call for one on the radio. Culture matters.
the best setup I ever saw was an in house union where every employee was in from CEO on down but no newbies nor any one in management or supervision could be an employees association officer. From day one we referred to the product as 'my' product that 'I' made. Every pay day we got to buy into the company if we wished to do so. I think they got bought out but I kept my address current because of the stocks. A few splits and a few decades later it was worth the trouble.
The others I just went mercenary. Did the job right and walked away with no further thought until the next shift.
That was while I was not in the military of course. There we were coerced into buying savings bonds on what would have been a RICO' violation anywhere else in most of their units the exception was my home regiment. We just ignored the rest of the pentagon as much as possible.
Directly addressing your point about textiles, clothing manufacturing, and entrepreneurship: industrialization can actually raise the value of quality-made cottage industry goods. People will pay a premium for "artisan" goods. Look at the price of hand-stitched originals in a couture shop, and then look at the price of one item from a mass produced line based on one of those originals.
The point being that, if the cottage industry laborer produces a quality item, there is no need for them to fear industrialization. Industrialization will actually distinguish their item as higher quality which, with effort, can translate into higher value.
This, of course, is where the quality of entrepreneurship must kick in.
As a personal anecdote, for a few years now, I've had a hobby of making scratch, handmade sourdough bread. You, or I, or anyone else can go into any grocery store and find very good quality mass produced bread. Regardless, I can always find buyers for my bread, at a premium, when I get in the mood to make some.
My family fights over it. Orders have come in for it out of the blue. I even had one guy trade me a generous pour of Pappy Van Winkle for it.
If industrialization were such a threat, why would any of these people go through such bother when there is so much mass produced, inexpensive bread readily available?
And even that is only possible because very few people are actually trying to do it. Had all the weavers who were put out of work by the automated loom sold hand-made goods as an alternative, the vast majority would have starved to death.