Worries about machines or robots taking the place of
humans go back at least as far as 1932, when Jean Harlow famously mentioned it
in the film Dinner at Eight, from
which the clip was taken. While
the post-World-War II boom ended the Great Depression and allayed such concerns
for a while, they have returned recently with a vengeance.
When a guy with dreadlocks who plays obscure Egyptian
musical instruments writes a book warning of a future economic disaster as
technological unemployment spreads, you can be excused for thinking he's just
one voice in the wilderness. But
when a clean-cut British high-tech entrepreneur comes along saying close to the
same thing, maybe you'd better listen.
What are both of these gentlemen talking about? Both of them are worried that as
computer and network technology improves, not just many but most jobs in
advanced economies will be done better, cheaper, and faster by machines. And then what will all the displaced
workers do?
The clean-cut Brit is Martin Ford, who founded a
Silicon Valley software firm and wrote Rise
of the Robots: Technology and the
Threat of a Jobless Future.
While I haven't read the book, in a recent interview published in the San Jose Mercury-News Ford echoes the
concern posed in his book's title.
He foresees a bleak future not only for semi-manual laborers such as
truck drivers, but for many white-collar workers such as radiologists,
journalists, and even lawyers. The
problem is a two-edged sword. Not
only will lots of people be unable to get good-paying jobs, but the supply side
will suffer as well. If nobody can
earn any money, it's going to be hard for the smart non-robotic elite who own
all the means of producing goods and services, to sell those goods and
services. Already, Ford says,
high-volume goods firms such as Wal-Mart are having trouble selling all their
stuff, because their customers are having trouble earning enough money to buy
it.
The dreadlocked musician is Jaron Lanier, who I
mentioned briefly in this space a few weeks ago. He wrote the book Who
Owns the Future? in which he makes essentially the same point. Suppose virtually all the service jobs
end up being performed by networked robots that are owned and operated by only
a few big privileged companies, which is typically the way this kind of thing
ends up. Then, Lanier says,
"When only certain privileged players can own capital, while everyone else
can only buy services, the market will eventually consume itself and evolve
into a nonmarket." What will
the vast unemployed majority buy those services with? Credit
cards?
Lanier and Ford have moderately different answers to
the problem, though neither one thinks solving it will be simple, easy, or
fast.
Ford advocates a guaranteed income, citing for support
no less an authority than the economist Friedrich Hayek, who is usually viewed
as favoring a conservative free-market approach. While it is true that Hayek accepted the notion of a
guaranteed minimum income, it's
unlikely that he envisioned an economy in which a few super-rich people and
firms would provide nearly all goods and services, and the rest of us poor
slobs would take our government checks and go buy whatever the super-rich
people wanted to sell to us.
Instead, Hayek viewed a minimum income as a small-scale safety net
intended for the few who either could not work by reason of disability or were
temporarily thrown out of work, not as a way of running the whole show.
Lanier's solution is more complicated. He thinks that we should transition to
an economy in which average people are paid for their teeny incremental
contributions to giant databases.
If, say, you write a review of a book that you bought on Amazon, you
ought to get paid, not only for writing the review, but every time somebody
reads it online, or copies it and uses it for something else, for a good long
while. His ruling principle would
be that anything useful or valuable that anyone does online should have that
person's name attached to it. And
nobody should be able to use it for any purpose without paying something to the
person who originated it.
No crystal ball is perfect, and so just because two
different high-tech gurus foresee the same looming problem doesn't mean it's as
inevitable as death and taxes. In
my own mostly white-collar profession of engineering, I have seen something
like what Lanier and Ford are talking about take place over the years. When I started out in this business in
the 1980s, the typical electrical engineer spent most of his (yes, his, rarely
her) time with his fingers in circuit boards or with a soldering iron in his
hand, building and testing prototype circuits. It was both a craft and an intellectual activity, but
craftsmanship was a good part of it.
Contrast that with a fairly typical senior design project I'm helping to
oversee this year. The students
took some raw signal data from the sponsoring company, are developing some
software using advanced commercial software tools to process it, and will
finish with a presentation of their software package to the sponsor.
It's all typing on a computer, as so much of
engineering has become. And while
the human brain is still involved in the process, it's moving toward a
situation where all it will take is one person (probably in sales) looking up
the solution to a customer's problem on a proprietary database, tweaking a few
options, and selling it. All the
engineering either has been done already, or is being done by software operating
on more software. Yes, somewhere
somebody has to write the software, but as software engineering gets more
efficient and people quit reinventing the wheel all the time and swap known
algorithms around, you need fewer and fewer people to get the same job done.
Will it all end up like Ford fears, 99% of us sitting
around on the dole playing computer games all day in our subsidized housing,
while the 1% live their fabled lives in Aruba or Cote d'Azur? Or like Lanier prefers, where the
middle class resurges with value in the form of money coming back to them as
they create value in the form of data, data that is currently being sucked into
the Googles and Facebooks with nothing spendable being given in return? Or like something else that neither
Ford nor Lanier foresees, except in patches?
My money is on the third option. It won't necessarily be better than the
other two. But I think these two
gentlemen are on to something that technologists and everyone else ought to be
aware of. Whether we can do
something about the problem before it gets much worse is another question
entirely. And if Jean Harlow were
here today, she might have to deal with a virtual-reality replacement for
her—unless she had a good robotic lawyer.
Sources: The interview with Martin
Ford by Matt O'Brien was published in the online version of the San Jose (California) Mercury-News on June 12, 2015 at http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28301217/q-martin-ford-robots-coming-your-job. Jaron Lanier wrote Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), from which I
quoted p. 356. I blogged about
Lanier last on May 11, 2015. I
also referred to the Wikipedia article on Friedrich Hayek.
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