Even though I entirely disagree with The Upcoming Robot Revolution, I really like it. It is a sort of unintended Bastiat satire for our time. Here we see the Luddite fear of technological innovation pushed to a reductio ad absurdum. I think it just makes it all the funnier that the author is entirely earnest and sincere in painting his dystopia where robots have taken away our jobs and much of the American population is being warehoused in “government welfare dormitories”. Here is the comment I made on this story on Digg:
Economic ignorance abounds in this piece. There is not some fixed pie of jobs such that any innovation in efficiency removes jobs from the pie leaving less jobs for everyone. if this were the case then the improvements in farming that eliminated 90% of the population from farming jobs would have resulted in 90% of the population being unemployed. They’re not. They found other things to do. Until humans run out of goods and services that they want there will always be work to do. Widespread use of robots would not make everyone unemployed, they would instead free up and empower human labor to take on new challenges.
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A well-made point that will be ignored by far too many who consider economics to be a zero-sum game, where “profit” is the phenomena of someone winning and someone losing.
Ah well. Viva la revolucion!
Who is going to demand so many robots? Presumably robots. What are they going to do with their savings?
We will take over and take care of you. You will not need to work for the things you desire; they will be your rights. We will solve all of your problems. All you have to do is let us have power.
News announcer Kent Brockman (The Simpsons – Deep Space Homer) mistakes a floating ant in a space shuttle experiment floating close to the camera for a giant space ant:
“Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we’ve just lost the picture, but what we’ve seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over — ‘conquered’ if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.”
Another fallicy in these articles is that they tend to assume that intellegence is seperate from free will – in todays terms it is the equivalent of saying that because scientific method is true, people are predestined by their circumstances, or their environment.
They just assume that robots will have all the intelligence, independence, and creativity of humans and more, but no real independent choice of their own. That is a HUGE assumption.
I do think a day will come where we can create robots with intelligence, but they will also, by necissity, have free will and all the same libertarian issues will still apply.
Vince,
LMAO! I remember that episode. Isn’t that the one where Homer is always losing out to the inanimate carbon rod?
yep: “in rod we trust”
I would think that a workforce of untiring robots who never slack off would result in an enormous increase in production. Such an increase should serve to drive prices down, resulting in less money required to live.
Also, with less manual labor required, people would be free for more scholarly or creative endeavors.
Like the author, I would think that robots would someday be built to do jobs like checkout clerk, hotel maid, restaurant server, and janitor. Why is it that it’s bad for robots to do jobs that people are always complaining are so crappy that it’s a shame anyone has to do them?
“There is no mystery — the jobless recovery is exactly what you would expect in a robotic nation. When automation and robots eliminate jobs, they are gone for good. The economy then has to invent new jobs. But it is much harder to do that now because robots can quickly fill the new jobs that get invented. See the FAQ for additional information.”
LOL: robots can quickly fill the new jobs that get invented. I guess one has to subject himself to the torture of reading the whole nutty article to get to the really funny parts.
Here’s another:
“Who Will Be First?
“Who will be the first large group of employees to be completely automated out of their jobs by robots? Chances are that it will be pilots. There are already robots in the cockpit: auto-pilots. We are rapidly coming to the point where airplanes can autonomously take off, fly to their destinations and land without human intervention. Airplanes use radar for their vision systems, and radar has been around for more than half a century. Pilots are prone to human error and they are incredibly expensive for the airlines. The elimination of pilots could happen as early as 2015.”
It is terrible. Do we really have any idea of what a horrible thing it was when telephone operators were displaced by automation? I shutter to think of how many unemployed operators there are today due to this one single innovation.
It’s all more than a little bit disconcerting.
Like the author, I would think that robots would someday be built to do jobs like checkout clerk, hotel maid, restaurant server, and janitor. Why is it that it’s bad for robots to do jobs that people are always complaining are so crappy that it’s a shame anyone has to do them?
Unless they are American robots, because they wouldn’t want to do those jobs either.
Read Jack Williamson’s 1948 science fiction novel The Humanoids–available in far more recent editions–for an idea of the consequences of man kind “served” by myriads of hyper efficient volitional robots.
The referenced article is almost a hilarious caricature of robot fear. I can’t help but be reminded of an old Saturday Night Live Skit that played on just these “robot fears”:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ovd72CPK6us
Oh yeah – that was funny.
Bottom line – robots require effort, materials, and energy to manufacture, operate, and maintain. I analogize the fears of some regarding robots with the fears of others regarding human cloning – just who is going to RAISE this race of Hitlers / Einsteins / Michael Jordans, HMM?
One huge fallacy that this author makes is equating raw computational power with intelligence. Sure, you could have processors that are thousands of times faster than today’s processors but that does not automatically mean that they can then build a robot that washes the dishes and cleans bathrooms. Intelligent software would be the major hurdle in achieving that.
I don’t think that you would have to make extremely intelligent software for a robot to wash dishes and clean bathrooms. It’d probably be more about getting the hardware for appropriate visual input – technology we should hopefully possess within the next couple of decades. Our software development is already advanced enough to program something to scrub dishes and toilets, or so I’d imagine.
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