Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (6 page)

Advanced agricultural robots are especially attractive in countries that do not have access to low-wage, migrant labor. Australia and Japan, for example, are both island nations with rapidly aging workforces. Security considerations likewise make Israel a virtual island in terms of labor mobility. Many fruits and vegetables need to be harvested within a very small time window, so that a lack of available workers at just the right time can easily turn out to be a catastrophic problem.

Beyond reducing the need for labor, agricultural automation has enormous potential to make farming more efficient and far less resource-intensive. Computers have the ability to track and manage crops at a level of granularity that would be inconceivable for human workers. The Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) at the University of Sydney is focused on employing advanced agricultural robotics to help position Australia as a primary supplier of
food for Asia’s exploding population—in spite of the country’s relative paucity of arable land and fresh water. ACFR envisions robots that continuously prowl fields taking soil samples around individual plants and then injecting just the right amount of water or fertilizer.
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Precision application of fertilizer or pesticides to individual plants, or even to specific fruits growing on a tree, could potentially reduce the use of these chemicals by up to 80 percent, thereby dramatically decreasing the amount of toxic runoff that ultimately ends up fouling rivers, streams, and other bodies of water.
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Agriculture in most developing countries is notoriously inefficient. The plots of land worked by families are often tiny, capital investment is minimal, and modern technology is unavailable. Even though farming techniques are labor-intensive, the land often has to support more people than are really necessary to cultivate it. As global population grows to 9 billion and beyond in the coming decades, there will be ever-increasing pressure to transition any and all available arable land into larger and more efficient farms that are capable of producing higher crop yields. Advancing agricultural technology will have a significant role to play, especially in countries where water is scarce and ecosystems have been damaged by overuse of chemicals. Increased mechanization, however, will also mean that the land will provide livelihoods for far fewer people. The historical norm has been for those excess workers to migrate to cities and industrial centers in search of factory work—but as we have seen, those factories are themselves going to be transformed by accelerating automation technology. In fact, it seems somewhat difficult to imagine how many developing countries will succeed in navigating these technological disruptions without running into significant unemployment crises.

In the United States, agricultural robotics has the potential to eventually throw a wrench into many of the fundamental assumptions that underlie immigration policy—an area that is already subject to intensely polarized politics. The impact is already evident in some areas that used to employ large numbers of farmworkers. In California, machines skirt around the daunting visual challenge of picking individual almonds by simply grasping the entire tree and violently shaking it. The almonds fall to the ground where they’ll be harvested by a different machine. Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.
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A
S ROBOTICS AND ADVANCED
self-service technologies are increasingly deployed across nearly every sector of the economy, they will primarily threaten lower-wage jobs that require modest levels of education and training. These jobs, however, currently make up the vast majority of the new positions being generated by the economy—and the US economy needs to create something on the order of a million jobs per year just to tread water in the face of population growth. Even if we set aside the possibility of an actual reduction in the number of these jobs as new technologies emerge, any decline in the rate at which they are created will have dire, cumulative consequences for employment over the long run.

Many economists and politicians might be inclined to dismiss this as a problem. After all, routine, low-wage, low-skill jobs—at least in advanced economies—tend to be viewed as inherently undesirable, and when economists discuss the impact of technology on these kinds of jobs, you are very likely to encounter the phrase “freed up”—as in, workers who lose their low-skill jobs will be freed up
to pursue more training and better opportunities. The fundamental assumption, of course, is that a dynamic economy like the United States will always be capable of generating sufficient higher-wage, higher-skill jobs to absorb all those newly freed up workers—given that they succeed in acquiring the necessary training.

That assumption rests on increasingly shaky ground. In the next two chapters we’ll look at the impact that automation has already had on jobs and incomes in the United States and consider the characteristics that set information technology apart as a uniquely disruptive force. That discussion will provide a jumping-off point from which to delve into an unfolding story that is poised to upend the conventional wisdom about the types of jobs most likely to be automated and the viability of ever more education and training as a solution: the machines are coming for the high-wage, high-skill jobs as well.

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A video of Industrial Perception’s box-moving robot can be seen on the company’s website at
http://www.industrial-perception.com/technology.html
.

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The company is not unaware of the potential impact its technology will have on jobs and, according to its website, plans to support a program that will offer discounted technical training to workers who are displaced.

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Economists categorize fast food as part of the service sector; however, from a technical standpoint it is really closer to being a form of just-in-time manufacturing.

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Google’s strong interest in robotics was further demonstrated in 2013, when the company purchased eight robotics start-up companies over a six-month period. Among the companies acquired was Industrial Perception.

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Precision agriculture—or the ability to keep track of and manage individual plants or even fruits—is part of the “big data” phenomenon, a subject that we’ll examine in more depth in
Chapter 4
.

Chapter 2

IS THIS TIME DIFFERENT?

On the morning of Sunday, March 31, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stood in the elaborately carved limestone pulpit at Washington National Cathedral. The building—one of the largest churches in the world and over twice the size of London’s Westminster abbey—was filled to capacity with thousands of people packed into the nave and transept, looking down from the choir loft, and squeezed into doorways. At least another thousand people gathered outside on the steps or at nearby St. Alban’s Episcopal Church to hear the sermon over loudspeakers.

It would be Dr. King’s final Sunday sermon. Just five days later the cathedral would again be overflowing with a far more somber crowd—including President Lyndon Johnson, senior cabinet officials, all nine Supreme Court justices, and leading members of Congress—gathered to honor King at a memorial service the day following his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.
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The title of Dr. King’s sermon that day was “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Civil and human rights were, as might be expected, a major component of his address, but he had in mind
revolutionary change on a much broader front. As he explained a short way into his sermon:

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”
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The phrase “triple revolution” referred to a report written by a group of prominent academics, journalists, and technologists that called itself the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. The group included Nobel laureate chemist Linus Pauling as well as economist Gunnar Myrdal, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, along with Friedrich Hayek, in 1974. Two of the revolutionary forces identified in the report—nuclear weapons and the civil rights movement—are indelibly woven into the historical narrative of the 1960s. The third revolution, which comprised the bulk of the document’s text, has largely been forgotten. The report predicted that “cybernation” (or automation) would soon result in an economy where “potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings.”
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The result would be massive unemployment, soaring inequality, and, ultimately, falling demand for goods and services as consumers increasingly lacked the purchasing power necessary to continue driving economic growth. The Ad Hoc Committee went on to propose a radical solution: the eventual implementation of a guaranteed minimum income made possible by the “economy of abundance” such
widespread automation could create, and which would “take the place of the patchwork of welfare measures” that were then in place to address poverty.
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The Triple Revolution report was released to the media and sent to President Johnson, the secretary of labor, and congressional leaders in March 1964. An accompanying cover letter warned ominously that if something akin to the report’s proposed solutions was not implemented, “the nation will be thrown into unprecedented economic and social disorder.” A front-page story with extensive quotations from the report appeared in the next day’s
New York Times,
and numerous other newspapers and magazines ran stories and editorials (most of which were critical), in some cases even printing the entire text of the report.
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The Triple Revolution marked what was perhaps the crest of a wave of worry about the impact of automation that had arisen following World War II. The specter of mass joblessness as machines displaced workers had incited fear many times in the past—going all the way back to Britain’s Luddite uprising in 1812—but in the 1950s and ’60s, the concern was especially acute and was articulated by some of the United States’ most prominent and intellectually capable individuals.

In 1949, at the request of the
New York Times,
Norbert Wiener, an internationally renowned mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote an article describing his vision for the future of computers and automation.
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Wiener had been a child prodigy who entered college at age eleven and completed his PhD
when he was just seventeen; he went on to establish the field of cybernetics and made substantial contributions in applied mathematics and to the foundations of computer science, robotics, and computer-controlled automation. In his article—written just three years after the first true general-purpose electronic computer was built at the University of Pennsylvania
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—Wiener argued that “if we can do anything in a clear and intelligible way, we can do it by machine” and warned that that this could ultimately lead to “an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty” powered by machines capable of “reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price.”
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Three years later, a dystopian future much like the one Wiener had imagined was brought to life in the pages of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel.
Player Piano
described an automated economy in which industrial machines managed by a tiny technical elite did virtually all the work, while the vast majority of the population faced a meaningless existence and a hopeless future. Vonnegut, who went on to achieve legendary status as an author, continued to believe in the relevance of his 1952 novel throughout his life, writing decades later that it was becoming “more timely with each passing day.”
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