that’s not what we meant by iron chef…
Robots and software are steadily displacing more and more workers. We’ve known this for the last decade as automation picked up the pace and entire professions are facing obsolescence with the relentless march of the machines. But surely, there are safe, creative careers no robot would ever be able to do. Say for example, cooking. Can a machine write an original cookbook and create a step-by-step guide for another robot to perfectly replicate the recipe every time on demand? Oh, it can. Well, damn. There go line cooks at some point in the foreseeable future. Really, can any mass market job not somehow dealing with making, modifying, and maintaining our machines and software be safe from automation? Well, sadly, the answer to that question seems to be a pretty clear and resounding “no,” as we’ve started hooking up our robots to the cloud to finally free them of the computational limits that held them back from their full potential. But what does this mean for us? Do we have to build a new post-industrial society?
Over the last century or so, we’ve gotten used to a factory work model. We report to the office, the factory floor, or a work site, spend a certain amount of hours doing the job, go home, then get up in the morning and do it all over again, day after day, year after year. We based virtually all of Western society on this work cycle. Now that an end to this is in sight, we don’t know how we’re going to deal with it. Not everybody can be an artisan or an artist, and not everyone can perform a task so specialized that building robots to do it instead would be too expensive, time consuming, and cost ineffective. What happens when robots build every house and where dirt cheap RFID tags on products and cloud-based payment systems made cashiers unnecessary, and smart kiosks and shelf-stocking robots have replaced the last retail odd job?
As a professional techie, I’m writing this from a rather privileged position. Jobs like mine really can’t really go away since they’re responsible for the smarter software and hardware. There’s been a rumor about software that can write software and robots that can build other robots for years, and while we actually do have all this technology already, a steady expert hand is still a necessity, and always will be since making these things is more of an art than a science. I can also see plenty of high end businesses and professions where human to human relationships are essential holding out just fine. But my concern is best summarized as First World nations turning into country-sized versions of San Francisco, a post-industrial times city which doesn’t know how to adapt to a post-industrial future. Massive income inequalities, insanely priced and seldom available housing, and a culture that encourages class-based self-segregation.
The only ways I see out of this dire future is either unrolling a wider social safety net (a political no-no that would never survive conservative fury), or making education cost almost nothing to retrain workers on the fly (a political win-win that never gets funded). We don’t really have very much time to debate this and do nothing. This painful adjustment has been underway for more than five years now and we’ve sitting on our hands letting it happen. It’s definitely very acute on the coasts, especially here on the West Coast, but its been making a mess out of factories and suburbs of the Midwest and the South. When robots are writing cookbooks and making lobster bisque that even competition-winning chefs praise as superior to their own creations, its time to tackle this problem instead of just talking about how we’re going to talk about a solution.
