Very true. There was an interesting study done (I'm trying to find the link) of newborn infants. I want to say that it was over some months. Some were cuddled and fussed over by the nursing staffs while others just had their basic physiological needs attended to (diapers, feeding, etc.). The incidents of SIDS among the babies who received little or no personal attention was staggering.

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.

Good points on corporate culture. If this is a "factor of production," then we can understand how the choices of entrepreneurs matter here as in other matters.

I have zero control over our website and had nothing to do with its design, So please refer your comments to David Kelley dkelley@atlassociety.org and Aaron Day ard@atlassociety.org or ardventures@gmail.com. I;m sure they'd love to hear from you. Of course, tell them you liked my piece if not the website! Thanks!

And from looking back, that's why I'm surprised at those who make the same sort of predictions about automation today that Marx was wrong about in the 1800a. I would acknowledge though that exponential change in robotics, biotech, nanotech, and genetics will mean change will take place over years or decades rather than centuries, This will pose unique challenges to freedom that way the Industrial Revolution did. Thus my attempts to get friends of freedom and reason to get involved with the communities of entrepreneurs pioneering these technologies.

And as you might have suspected, "The Robots of Labor Day" was a bit of a tip of the hat to "The Robots of Dawn."

Good answer.

Nice tirade, Michael, and hard to argue, just as I could go on and on about Jim Sinegal and Eric Schmidt and make broad claim about "all capitalists" or "all CEOs." I will not attempt to defend all of the labor unions in the world any more than I would claim that the Atlas Shrugged movies were the epitome of cinema.

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.

I have to take exception to your comment that my father was responsible for railroad's failures. That is squarely upon the shoulders of the mis-managers who ran the railroads.

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.

Every animal is under Natural Laws.

We will use our brains extended and augmented by the technology to answer the question of what we will do. The age of the Factory Worker as a good middle class employment basis is disappearing fast just as the age of the street sweeper and horse drawn carriage maker disappeared. The world changes and moves on.

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.

We are not like most animals in the critical capacity to reason and to guide our actions via reason.

There is no such thing as "our jobs" in the property sense. There is what we are doing today to value to others, valued in money to ourselves. That is it. What is economically viable for us to do is utterly dependent on the context. As the context changes we seek utter ways to gainfully add value. As technology advances more quite new and even today difficult to imagine things become possible and more currently viable activities in the marketplace become less so or are performed quite differently. This is Reality.

I'm not sure. I'm more inclined to agree with you on children than on the elderly. People do seem to be able to build attachments to artificial constructs. The early work with ELIZA, the relatively simplistic program that simulated a psychologist showed that people shared some sort of connection readily.

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.

Robots will likely take over most of the physical needs of the elderly (and possibly children), but not their emotional and other psychological ones.

All at once, and overnight, that situation you describe ceased to exist. "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 ..." As I recall, it was 1995 when I was in a GM plant with no old people. The skilled trades - electricians, pipefitters, riggers - were gone, all replaced by a single job title: technician.

Well, actually, Tom, railroad men like your father benefited from "featherbedding" by the unions. Keeping firemen on diesel engines is a perfect example. That was why your father worked fewer hours for more pay. He helped to kill the railroads.

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.

Again, Ed, we can look back - and do so from the twin peaks of Austrian economics and Objectivist ethics. While the Luddites are still with us, the fact is that even the most popular of them all, J.R.R. Tolkien, allowed his hobbits to have watermills. No one complained that watermills put threshers out of work.

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.

Yes, we understand that now. The Luddites were much like the capitalists and entrepreneurs of their time who thought that government subsidies, tariffs, etc., were good for them. We know better. Early on in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith quipped that seldom does any group of tradesmen gather for dinner without concocting a scheme to restrict commerce to their favor. They still do, but we have better arguments now, and a long history of empirical evidence to counter that. They still get away with it, of course. So, the struggle continues.

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?

The Da Vinci robot for surgery here:
http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/

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.

A fine story, blackswan! Funny, I was looking at a rather fancy slide rule the other day locked in a case in an antique store and smiled at it thinking I used to use one of those, myself. I have a few lying around someplace at home and, having a woodworking hobby, I thought it may be amusing to place one in a wood case with a glass front etched with the words "In case of power failure, break glass." and hang it in my man-cave computer room. I never got around to doing that, but your post made me think of it again. I'm sure we could sit on my front porch with a cold one and trade some great stories of tech days gone by.

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.

I'm not sure about raising children but caring for the elderly is an area that robotics presents significant hope. Self driving cars will remove the point at which one can no longer safely drive, robotic tools to monitor you will allow people to stay at home longer -- and nursing room care is incredibly expensive.

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.

Actually, if it moves to China, it may still be filled by a robot. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/opi...