Boy, it seems like I only write a post once a year. But sometimes, that's about i can find that motivates to address issues like the one I'm including here. I posted it on Facebook, to accompany an article about how American miners will soon find themselves replaced by robots and robot driven vehicles. The article is here: Hey, miners, robots don't give a shit about your working class culture
Robots, after all, don't demand higher wages, time off, or health insurance.And they don't complain, either. One time capital coast, occasional maintenance, and who cares about wages? They can all be turned into profits and increase investors dividends. It'a not immigrants who are stole jobs, it's robots.
I’m a labor historian by training, but I'm also a long-time science fiction fan. Where we're heading is just another example of what is called de-skilling or de-qualification. My own scholarly writings have discussed this, especially how the combine-harvester ended the need for harvest workers in the Wheat Belt.
It’s not new, really. Since the industrial revolution, machines have replaced people. But the profits always go to the owners, who just toss people aside like detritus.
I've also expected robots to do a lot of jobs. But in the science fiction future, this was to allow people to do other, more human, more creative things. A chance to actually play, enjoy leisure.
Instead, people are just becoming another thruway, like paper towels, toilet paper, styrofoam coffee cups. And now conservatives want to destroy the meagre social safety net that at least gave what have become disposable people a chance to live in dignity and reasonable health in retirement . Perhaps things will only change when robots begin to replace executives, businessmen, and, dare I say, politicians? It's never a problem until it's in your backyard and it affects you.
We will soon have a future in which food rots because no one has a job or can earn money to buy food. Manufactured goods will stack up because there is no one able to buy them. People will sit on their haunches all day waiting for something, anything, to happen, while all around them inventories of unsold, items will form toward to the sky. Those who place their faith in a “free” market will soon learn robots don’t buy your products and the invisible hand is a cruel god. And we fail to understand how we need to retrain and re-educate people for the future. Instead, too many people are expecting the old factories to reopen, the old jobs to return, but that will never be. Because robots. Robots driving trucks, robots mining coal, robots building cars. Hell, robots pumping gasoline, trimming trees, running leaf blowers across rich peoples' lawns.
Sadly, I fear our future is going to resemble North Korea’s present (find a book called “Nothing to Envy,” a BBC Prize winning book about life in North Korea.) There a bizarre economic system that even the most hardened communist would find difficulty in explaining, has simply left everyone unemployed, on the verge of starvation, and essentially living sa pointless existence.
Now that is because of economic magical thinking. We’ll end up doing the same by replacing people with machines. I think more and more people will end up standing outside the employment offices, looking for day jobs—maybe picking up litter or going through landfills looking useable material,
Ever wonder why there’s some many dystopian novels? Most usually involve also sorts of disasters like wars, climate change, floods, social collapse. None of them, as far as I know, deal with a dystopian that just results naturally from automation and robotics. Oh, yeah, there’s The Terminator and the War with the Machines, but I don’t think that’s what will happen. We and our machines won’t battle each other. Instead the machines will just keep working away, making things, mining things, driving things, load and unloading things, even though no one is around to buy those things, because we’ll be extinct as a species, our bodies buried under temples of unsold products, temples that will grow higher and higher until the machines break down and there is no one to repair them. There won’t be any Apocalypse with spirits and beings in the sky fighting for “Good and Evil.” Instead, I fear the end will be the last viable gear finally breaking from metal fatigue and the last machine suddenly stopping, and all will be silence—for eternity.
Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but one of the curse of being a historian is seeing a bad idea when it comes around again. I hope 2017 will prove me wrong, but I’m laying any bets on it. 2016 has just been too horrifying to contemplate things getting anything but worse.
And as a labor historian, I fear robots will make my specialty a quaint antique one, and sadly, sooner rather than later. Hell, there's already robots programmed to write sports stories. Who's to say what profession vanishes next? Not even janitors are safe anymore.
