Robots are coming to take our jobs!
It’s funny: I tend to be skeptical about expansive visions of technological transformation. Our human impulses keep the reality that actually unfolds quaintly venal and simple-minded. Douglas Adams remains my favorite guide to the future. But I do think this could be a real problem.
Americans’ physical needs have been pretty well met for a while now. It sure looks like more and more people are hitting a ceiling on the marginal utility of their dollars. And there haven’t been any hugely popular new product categories for decades — no flying cars, no medical breakthroughs that add decades to life. Just steadily better and cheaper consumer goods, and the debut of various useful but negligibly expensive information technology gadgets. I’m starting to actually believe I could outlive scarcity (in America, anyway).
I am much less gloomy about what we do after that point than Mr. Staniford seems to be. Robots might take a lot of work away from us, but I can’t imagine a future where they take all the meaningful work. Ever been in a nursing home? A mental health facility? An underperforming school? If we really find ourselves with more resources than we know what to do with, applying them toward minimizing human suffering strikes me as a pretty worthwhile project, and one that could occupy an almost arbitrarily large number of people.
Or we could just have everyone spend their days carving elaborate friezes onto our public infrastructure. Hell, let’s build some new pyramids! I don’t know! But I am increasingly suspicious that how we redirect our surplus resources will be the central moral and political problem of the next few generations. No joke: this is why I’m trying to convince Yglesias to write his next book about the economics of Star Trek. Barring some deeply unsettling discoveries about physics, we’re not going to see replicators or holodecks arrive anytime soon. But it’s probably the most widely-known fictional work that even occasionally addresses this problem, which makes it seem like as good a framing device as any.
Or, perhaps more plausibly, we might have an ecological or epidemiological catastrophe that causes the collapse of global civilization. In which case we can probably just ignore these questions and enjoy the time we have left.
UPDATE: I realized I should’ve linked to this post by Yglesias; for how short it is, it really covers an incredible amount of territory. Better still, I finally got around to reading the Peter Frase essay it links to, which is shockingly good (and includes the trenchant Star Trek analysis I crave). And that, in turn, links to this Charles Stross blog post, which is also very good.
robots will get our boring, repetitive jobs while leaving the ones that require creativity to us humans. The future looks bright for the intelligent creative folks.