The Robots are Coming!

One of the reasons the Federal Reserve bank is cutting the interest rate to near zero is a desire to encourage businesses to borrow money to start new enterprises and create new jobs. In fact businesses are mostly using this opportunity to restructure their debt at lower levels. However, there is one area where companies are making new investments, robotics and automation. American companies are doing everything they possibly can to eliminate as many employees as possible.

It is part of a trend that dates back at least 200 years to the dawn of the industrial age. (Wikipedia) “The Luddites were a social movement of 19th-century English textile artisans who protested—often by destroying mechanized looms—against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, that replaced them with less-skilled, low-wage labour, leaving them without work and changing their way of life. Eric Hobsbawm called machine wrecking: "collective bargaining by riot".”

In the 19th century as many as 95 out of 100 Americans were involved in agriculture. Now less than 5% of our work force produces more food than their great grandparents could possibly imagine. Mechanization, superior seed, custom blended fertilizers, and economy of scale have completely revolutionized food production. The same forces have been at work in industry for several generations. Today, flexible programmable robots and machine tools have replaced the majority of American factory jobs left in our country. They work long hours without rest, never complain, ask for a raise, or require health insurance. They make U.S. manufacturing more competitive with cheap foreign labor. This trend is returning more profits and some production to our country, but not the secure high quality industrial jobs of the past.

In a recent article, Mark Cuban, the eccentric owner of the Dallas Mavericks observed, “What has happened is that the brick and mortar world has had every bit of intelligence that can be sucked out of it completely removed. Any information that can be created, identified or recognized is being captured in as automated a process as possible and delivered to “big data” or even small data databases in the cloud. What used to require some intelligence at the brick and mortar work place has been seeded and ceded into the cloud.” The middle class job is getting squeezed out of existence by technology that replaces middling intelligence with a machine. This is not just the traditional union assembly line job in an automobile factory. It doesn’t take a genius to prepare that production report you create every week. Accounting software in the cloud can prepare an infinite number of customized reports in the blink of an eye. All it needs is a low level data entry clerk to feed it the numbers.

I can’t find the quote, but once a noted futurist was asked to predict the first applications for truly advanced robotics. He didn’t hesitate replying, "super soldiers and sexual surrogates." I would add menial labor. The military robots are already here. We call them smart bombs, cruise missiles and unmanned vehicles. It is curious that the first complete replacement of humans with computers in a military application was cruise missiles. College educated bomber pilots with diplomas and thousands of hours of specialized training were easy to replace. It turns out replacing an infantryman with a machine is a task well beyond the current state of the art in Artificial Intelligence. The 18 year old high school dropout with a cheap assault rifle and a trenching tool has been optimized by millions of years of evolution to run around the woods while attempting to kill his brother. And Oh Yes! I have recently read the Japanese are attempting to develop a robot to replace women (really!).

Stepford Wives here we come?

Even though I am familiar with the economic concept of creative destruction, I am very uneasy about artificial intelligence invading my world. Factory workers displaced by automation are not finding new jobs of equivalent quality. In the office, artificial intelligence is impoverishing many clerical jobs, turning positions that required some knowledge and skill into piecework for data entry clerks.

I know that in 20 years there will be new jobs that can’t even be imagined today. Even in today’s dismal employment situation, Mark Cuban observes, “And those cloud based service companies are hiring, hiring, hiring. You would be hard pressed to find a single example of one of these companies that is not looking to hire more smart people. Experience not required.”

He adds, “That giant sucking sound you hear is the sound of intelligence being sucked from the brick and mortar locations into smart applications in the cloud licensed or owned by the companies that own the brick and mortar locations.”

I am no Luddite but I hope that the pace of real innovation is controllably slow.

Most people are just average. Where are the new roles for these individuals? For a society to prosper rewards better be coupled to desirable behavior. "How then is wealth to be divided now that robots create the robots, that create the computers, that manipulate the knowledge that defines power in this brave new world. People are, for better or worse, what they do (that is the sum total of their various roles in society). I believe these roles do not limit us but protect us from our own mediocrity (A warehouse man in a factory can earn enough to support a family. This along with other roles such as husband, father, church deacon, union-rep etc. lead to self esteem). If an individual perceives his role in society as being a burden to his betters, should we be surprised that he becomes a member of a street gang in one of our inner cities or commits suicide in an environment like an Indian reservation or drinks himself to death in a slum in Northern Ireland?"

Freedom from work and responsibility is no answer. If too much leisure time is made available for self discovery by new applications for artificial intelligence the results for the average person may not be at all desirable. After making lumpy pots in a ceramics class and attending too many meditation seminars, we may just discover that there is nothing to discover. Will we then retreat into drugs or alcohol or perhaps, virtual reality?