New York artist Stephen Green's latest
painting, DemandedDislocation, combines current affairs irony with a
deeply sad vision of the future. Note the workers protesting for higher wages
in front of the discount robots store.
Green's point is that two big trends are intersecting:
- The push by workers for their fair share of record corporate profits, in
the form of a higher minimum wage and better pay for jobs a rung or two up
on the income ladder.
- Breakthroughs in robotics that make it possible to automate a whole range
of service and factory work. See The
burger flipping robot that could put fast food workers out of a job and Meet
the robots shipping your Amazon order.
A cynic might observe that trend number 2 appears to explain why trend number
1 is proceeding so smoothly. In the past year a growing number of cities and
states have raised
their minimum wage while corporations like McDonald's
and Wal-Mart have begun paying their people more. That they're doing so
without much of a fight would be suspicious if they didn't have an angle. Now
we see what it is:
Corporations seem be running the numbers on the latest generation of robots
and finding that they don't profitably replace $7-an-hour workers. But raise
the prevailing wage to $10 or $15 and suddenly it becomes justifiable (actually
mandatory from a profit-maximization standpoint) to replace millions of unpredictable,
argumentative, messy humans with low-maintenance, tireless, ever-improving
mechanical slaves. It's a fantasy not out of industrial capitalism but of feudalism,
with robots as serfs and human workers no longer part of the equation.
And automation isn't stopping at repetitive service/factory work. Artificial
intelligence has progressed to the point where a whole range of knowledge work
can be handed off to algorithms. Money
management, legal services, medical
diagnostics and many, many other symbol manipulation jobs are now threatened
with accelerating extinction. And forget about banking. A combination of crowdfunding
and AI will vaporize most of that industry within a decade.
It's hard to view this trend with anything other than mixed feelings. Robots,
AI and their cousins are extremely cool, and most fans of science and/or science
fiction (that's everybody, right?) have been waiting for them since childhood.
But combine a tidal wave of automation with the fact that most new US jobs
are in vulnerable industries -- food, drink, office temp, transactional stuff
like banking, etc. -- and it's hard to see where tomorrow's debt service payments
will come from.
