Raging (again) against the robots

The robots are coming! Word is they want your job, your life and probably your little dog, too. Robots have once again gripped the nation’s imagination, stoking fears of displaced jobs and perhaps even a displaced human race.

An alarmist segment on “60 Minutes” was only the most vivid of a recent series of pieces in respected magazines and news outlets warning about widespread worker displacement.

Professors at Cambridge University and a co-founder of Skype are creating a new centre for the study of existential risk, which would research a “Terminator”-like scenario in which supercomputers rise up and destroy their human overlords, presumably plotting the whole caper in zeros and ones.

In New York alone, there are four plays running this month with themes of cybernetics run amok. One is a revival of “RUR,” a 1920 Czech play that was the granddaddy of the cybernetic revolt genre and that originated the current meaning of the word “robot.”

Such android anxiety has a long history. John Maynard Keynes wrote about “technological unemployment” during the Great Depression. In the industrial revolution, disgruntled labourers — including the original Luddites — smashed automated looms and threshing machines that “stole” their jobs. In the 15th century, scribes protested the printing press, with a futile zeal rivaled perhaps only by that of modern journalists.

Even Aristotle foretold that automation would expunge the need for labour, observing that if “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”

Throughout the 20th century, science fiction writers created pop culture touchstones about technological tyranny. Among the most resonant is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 “Player Piano,” about a dystopia in which mechanisation has displaced the lower classes and assigned the world’s wealth to engineers and managers.

You might even carbon-date this literary line to the Golem of Prague, a 16th-century Jewish legend about a clay automaton that ultimately destroyed those it was designed to protect. That story, too, recently enjoyed a revival on the New York rialto.
There is something almost Freudian in these robot takeover terrors, which foretell that the technology we fathered will rise up against us, rendering us obsolete or even extinct.

It’s not exactly clear, though, what triggers these fears, which seem to come in both good economic times and bad. It might be actual accelerations in technical change. But Andreas Bauer, an official with the international federation of robotics and a German robotics company executive, says that such fears are unheard-of in the equally mechanised economies of contemporary Japan and Europe.

In Japan, he says, people love the anthropomorphic robots that give Americans the willies. Factories in Germany have big, splashy media junkets to announce their latest automation investments, moves their North American counterparts dare not publicly divulge.

Labour protection

Labour also has more protections in these other developed countries, making it harder to fire workers when more efficient manufacturing processes are developed; in fact, labour contracts in Japan have traditionally banned laying off workers displaced by automation. In the 1980s, economists credited these contract provisions with helping make Japanese manufacturing so productive, since workers had an incentive to suggest efficiency improvements.

In hindsight, historical fears of technological change look foolish, given that automation has increased living standards and rendered our workweeks both safer and shorter. In 1900, when nearly half the American labour force was employed in backbreaking agriculture, the typical worker logged 2,300 hours a year, according to Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University. Today that number is 1,800. (If you believe “The Jetsons,” by 2062  we’ll be working only two hours a week; Keynes had similar forecasts.)

That said, creative destruction is undoubtedly painful. Historically, the children of displaced workers have benefited from mechanisation, but the displaced workers themselves have often been permanently passé.

“Every invention ever made caused some people to lose jobs,” says  Mokyr. “In a good society, when this happens, they put you out to pasture and give you a golf club and a condo in Florida. In a bad society, they put you on the dole, so you have just enough not to starve, but that’s about it.”

And many economists today believe the transition will be even more difficult this time around.

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at MIT and co-author of the book Race Against the Machine, argues that we have reached a sort of inflection point in productivity growth. It took expensive capital equipment to revolutionise farming and manufacturing; the marginal cost of the technologies (software and so on) producing the most recent gains in efficiency is near zero. Any job that can be reduced to an algorithm will be, leading to the displacement of workers in industries as diverse as retail and radiology.

That’s not to say there will be no new jobs to fill the void: we can scarcely imagine the industries and occupations that will flower as the economy adjusts, just as prior deep thinkers could not have conceived of today’s nanophysicists or social media consultants. The challenge, of course, is training or retraining workers quickly enough to take on new, higher-skilled roles.

An optimist like  Mokyr might note that the economy is actually becoming unusually good at scaling up retraining programmes just as we need them most. The technological shocks that have affected manufacturing and office administration, after all, are now infiltrating education: with online courses, an expert can teach 60,000 students at a time rather than the 60  Mokyr lectured on Tuesday.

Mokyr is not too worried about what this will mean for his own livelihood, despite the mass layoffs that similar cybernetic developments have wrought over every other industry he has studied. “I can be displaced by technology, but they still can’t fire me,” he says. “I have tenure.”