Happy Half Tau Day!

Happy half-Tau Day!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Robots

A new Financial Times article highlights some of the risks to workers in the rise of technology, the potential to displace workers in nearly all fields. Is this necessarily a bad thing?

I still maintain that technological unemployment is a good thing, but worries about it are nothing new. Keynes called it a new disease and championed to fight it by trying to foster full employment, but the two are incompatible in concept. Declining wages through inflation help to promote higher employment rates, but in the long-run, we are not dead.

The intention of technology is to replace the need for high levels of human labor in a variety of industries. Assembly lines were the first transition toward this consistency and efficiency, such as Henry Ford's example. Before that, the cotton gin freed the slaves before politicians could sort out emancipating them. Today, we have entire automobile factories staffed by humans only in supervisory positions to monitor and maintain the robots that create automobiles. This makes manufacturing processes safer by removing the human from dangerous environments, along with making the goods more consistent from one unit to the next. This frees us up to pursue other interests and hobbies, providing us more leisure time through lower labor demands.

This has fed two visions of the future of work. In one, the machines take on many of the boring parts of a job, setting humans free to supply the more advanced – and satisfying – brain work. The other vision is less harmonious: the machines leave many human workers on the scrap heap altogether.

Or it should. No sympathy for the Luddites. We have to learn new skills to survive in a society that heavily taxes the individual, not fight progress.

The future could be a very optimistic progressive shift toward automated labor, like a science fiction story, if politics didn't get in the way and negate many of those advancements. I think that in the long-run, politics is not able to hold back progress, and technology will give us that freedom from labor, but who knows when that might happen. Looking back into history, this seems to be the trend as well.

It is obvious that physical labor will continue with this trend, but the processing capacity of computers is nearing that of the human brain, and Kurzweil's research suggests that within a generation they will surpass our cognitive abilities. Eventually, artificial intelligence might remove humans from the process entirely, but that is still firmly in the realm of science fiction. In the meantime, the potential for computers to disrupt and displace work that involves research and processing data is highly likely, and has already occurred in some settings. Before AI can be a viable threat, it must pass the Turing test, but eventually technology has the potential to displace almost any human labor. Just hope that the Three Laws are included as standard features, and that they work in real-world applications...

Despite churning out 40 reports a day, he claims the robo-writer, called Quill, was good at disguising its non-human origins: “They changed the grammar and language – you couldn’t tell it was from a computer.” He admits the human writers at his company “freaked out” when they heard he was planning to use the system.

In the design and publishing world, especially in our assessment processes, the demand for human labor is constantly declining. We are constantly looking for ways to automate the products we deliver, and do so at lower costs. In my position, I use technology to automate creation and cleanup of batches of files that in years past were handled manually, one at a time. I am unemploying the designers that I work with every day. I sympathize with them, because many of the skills I learned when I entered printing have become outmoded, many of my previous positions no longer exist. And I believe that someday even what I do now will be automated by computers, but I embrace that potential. I would rather spend my days reading books, exploring the wilderness, and connecting with friends and family than laboring away. Technological unemployment has the potential to bring that life to reality.