May 18, 2015
AN END TO DRUDGERY:
Soon They'll Be Driving It, Too : Intelligent machines are ousting low-skilled workers now. Next they'll start encroaching on white-collar livelihoods. (SUMIT PAUL-CHOUDHURY, May 15, 2015, WSJ)
Martin Ford's "Rise of the Robots" offers a more prosaic reason for concern: Partially intelligent machines might render humans not so much extinct as redundant. "No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend specific sectors of the economy and job market," writes Mr. Ford, a Silicon Valley software developer turned futurist. Will machine intelligence, tackling tasks once thought of as humanity's exclusive preserve, "disrupt our entire system to the point where a fundamental restructuring may be required if prosperity is to continue?"Mr. Ford invokes Norbert Wiener, who in 1949 prophesied an "industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty" in which machines would outstrip humans in routine work "at any price." In Mr. Ford's view, just such a revolution is under way in blue-collar work. Robots are ousting low-skilled workers everywhere, from fast-food joints to factory floors--a trend that Mr. Ford argues is central to the puzzling "jobless recovery" of the past decade as well as to other anomalous trends in pay and employment.Now the machines are encroaching on white-collar livelihoods, which is why the intelligentsia have begun to wake up to their advance.
A fundamental restructuring will obviously be needed, but not a terribly complex one. Right now, we produce things via a system where some significant component of the final cost is a function of paying for human labor. This has been convenient because it allows us to redistribute some considerable portion of the cost of the finished good to the human laborers. Key to making the modern economy function so well under these circumstances was the series of decision by businesses and government to transfer more wealth to the laborers than their labor was actually worth--via unionization, minimum wages; etc.
The transition to a labor-less economy will either see the cost of finished goods plummet or transfers of wealth that are even less related to the value of labor (since it will be worthless) or, most likely, some combination of the two.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2015 1:24 PM
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