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Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
Consumers love ATMs, self-checkout machines and airport boarding-pass kiosks. But what about the workers who get automated out of existence?
Sep 18, 2003 | The first thing you should know about Marshall Brain is that he is not, despite his dim take on the future, a Luddite. To people who've read some of his essays, this is hard to believe, but Brain, a 42-year-old businessman and father of four who lives in Raleigh, N.C., has always been passionate about technology. In college, Brain studied computer science and electrical engineering. He went on to start a computer consulting firm and to write several programming manuals, and then, in the late 1990s, Brain jumped on the dot-com gravy train. He created HowStuffWorks.com, an ingenious collection of Web pages that explain everything technical under the sun, from light-emitting diodes to limited slip differentials to Botox.
The second thing you should know about Marshall Brain is that he is gravely concerned about the ongoing tech revolution. Perhaps because he has so much faith in technology, Brain sees no bounds to its progress, and he believes that within a short time -- two or three decades -- machines will be capable of doing much of what humans do now. In the past year, Brain has written a series of widely discussed essays and five chapters of a science fiction novel exploring this question: What will become of human society -- especially the economy -- when robots take all our jobs?
It might seem premature to begin worrying about competing for jobs with robots, but Brain is not just thinking about C-3PO and R2-D2. He points out that "primitive" robots -- in the form of ATMs, pay-at-the-pump gas service, self-checkout machines at supermarkets, boarding-pass kiosks at airports -- are among us already. These systems can provide profound benefits to society, but Brain believes that we must institute a series of progressive economic policies to make sure that the "roboticization" of our jobs does not cause massive destitution.
Is Brain right? Will technology send us to the unemployment line? In general, economists have a hard time answering this question. The relationship between job growth and productivity growth is complex, and even during today's "jobless recovery" economists are arguing about whether recent productivity gains are helping or hurting Americans. But one thing appears certain -- many of the jobs we rely on today will soon vanish from the American landscape.
"Technology is continuing to eat away at any routine services," says Robert Reich, an economist at Brandeis University who served as President Clinton's first labor secretary. "Anything that can be done by software, or by someone in China or India or the Philippines, is not going to be here. It will not pay a person to do it."
Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing probably has a lot to do with whether your job will soon be automated out of existence.
Marshall Brain's ideas are not completely novel -- Bill Joy, Jeremy Rifkin, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and others have been ruminating on the pros and the cons of robotic society for years. But Brain's essays come at a particularly low point in the U.S. economy; after more than two years of constant job losses due to recession, automation, globalization and other forces of economic nature, Americans are probably quite ready to believe, these days, that bad times are here to stay. Job losses due to productivity gains in the manufacturing sector -- in automobile factories, steel plants and textile mills -- are already an old story. Soon, workers in the service sector -- in, say, retail shops, restaurants, construction sites and all sorts of others that have so far been relatively unaffected by automation -- will become as replaceable as the poor souls working in manufacturing.
Brain writes that in about 10 years, "every big box retailer will be using automated checkout lines. Robotic help systems will guide shoppers in the stores. The automated inventory management robots will allow the first retailer to lay off a huge percentage of its employees. Competitive pressure will force Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, BJ's, Sam's Club, Toys 'R' Us, Sears, J.C. Penney, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Max, Staples, Office Depot, Kroger, Winn-Dixie, Pet Depot and on and on and on to adopt the same robotic inventory systems in their stores." Fifteen million people work in retail in the United States, and Brain guesses that automated systems will put 10 million of them out of work.
But retail-industry experts do not agree with Brain's analysis; while cost-obsessive retailers like Wal-Mart could very well automate everything in their stores (Brain insists that the "robotic Wal-Mart" is not far off), higher-end retailers aiming for better customer service will probably still find use for humans. Indeed, according to people who've studied the introduction of self-checkout systems in supermarkets, cashiers being replaced by these machines are not being let go. Instead, companies move these people to other parts of the store, where they can better help customers find what they need. Even the United Food and Commercial Workers, the union that represents workers at A&P, Safeway, Kroger, Albertson's and many other large supermarket chains, says that it has not seen any losses due to these machines -- so far.
And this provides a good glimpse of what work will look like in the future. Instead of scanning and bagging someone's groceries, perhaps it'll be your job to walk a shopper through the store and help him choose the perfect wine or cheese, or maybe you'll just be stuck watching the customer's screaming 2-year-old while the shopper decides on gourmet olives. Reich says that, increasingly, low-end jobs will be in this "personal service" category; massage therapy and childcare are two growth fields he points to. The rest of us, if we're lucky, will find work in what some people call the "knowledge business" -- "in enjoyable but unessential activities like writing Salon articles and robot books," as Hans Moravec, a robot scientist at Carnegie Mellon and the author of the book "Robot," put it in an e-mail. These activities, Moravec suggests, will not easily be replicated by machines. Here's hoping.
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