People all over the world seem to be indifferent to the likely effect that robots will have on huge working populations.
Let us be quite clear: robots, whether making cars, computers or washing machines are a capitalist’s dream. They work twenty four hours a day, never need a toilet stop or a gossip at the coffee machine. They need no healthcare (not much, anyway) and no pension. Indeed, they can be profitably recycled, which we cannot be. Why, if you were a CEO would you not like to robotize everything in sight, except, of course, yourself. Accountancy and computer maintenance can be outsourced to Vietnam, leaving you to do the crossword puzzle, aided only by some techies in white coats, there to make sure the machines never break down.
This scenario cements the power of the CEO, guarantees that he takes, not just a vulgar size of salary, but damn near all of it. The rest of the country’s workforce is left without a job, without an income and presumably without food. This is the ultimate in “productivity”, the economist’s euphemism for reducing the workforce and handing more cash to the boss, the bankers and the investors.
Epicurus would deem this a death blow to civilization. All that will be left is a vegetable garden, and no doubt some joker will automate that as well. We face a serious threat.
Recently there was an earthquake in Los Angeles. Nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that the news was broken by the Los Angeles Times using a robot: “This post was created by an algorithm written by the author”. No job is safe.
Good and discouragingly true post. A planet of seven billion people and robots destroy work? It’s insane.
Get ready for the digital “earthquake”
At first glance the “brave new digital world” we’re entering looks a lovely place. Cutting out the middle man, it enables you to edit your own online magazine, publish your own music, rent out your own house on Airbnb. You can even dispense with estate agents: a new website, Estates Direct, will let you sell your home for just £390 plus VAT. But before getting carried away, pause to consider the swathe of middle-class jobs this is poised to destroy – the estate agents, publishers and journalists whose work is now “worth pretty much nothing”. Academics, too, are under threat: Moocs (massive open online courses) now offer classes at almost no cost to their students. Yet our politicians are oblivious to all this. Their solutions for creating jobs belong to the pre-digital age: freeing business from red tape (the Tories); protecting the public sector (Labour). In our digital world, however, most workers (80%) are in the private sector, and increasingly they don’t report to a boss. An “earthquake” is about to hit the middle classes and we just haven’t seen it coming. (Christina Patterson, The Guardian, April 9)