One of the several jobs-related topics getting gobs of press
this year has been robots. I could write
a post every week on only the stories released, even if I just hit their high
and low points. However, in the interest
of writing on other topics as well I have restrained myself to two, on January
15th and May 2nd, unless you count my March 25 artificial
intelligence issue.
On May 2 I named nine points for universal agreement, on
robots’ lack of actual intelligence, their need for controlled environments,
their one-way progress, their potential to do any algorithmic task, the value
of projecting where they are going, their productivity gains always involving
job takeovers, their uncertain acceptance, and the dangers of their being
programmed amorally. These aren’t really
controversial, and everyone from Luddites to Ray Kurzweil should buy into
them. However, too many otherwise good
recent articles have included clearly incorrect statements. What are they, and why are they wrong?
“March of the machines” (The
Economist, June 25th) cited artificial intelligence (AI) researcher
Andrew Ng as saying that worrying about a general AI breaking free of human
controls “is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars before colonists have
even set foot there.” While I have not
taken what is now called AI as seriously as most, since to me it seems only
incrementally more advanced than simple if-then computer programming, if we can
teach systems how to learn and how to set their own goals we must consider what
they might do, as their actions could be far less controllable than regulating
the number of people moving to or even living on an extraterrestrial base.
In Harvard Business
Review’s June 23rd “Knowledge Jobs Most Likely to Be Automated,”
authors Julia Kirby and Thomas H. Davenport noted the trend for robots and
other automating features to take over parts of jobs, which they say prevents
naming areas where people should avoid jobs and careers. That is false, since as I documented in
2013’s Choosing a Lasting Career, jobs in the 25 U.S. Department of
Labor career groups vary vastly in how susceptible they are to not only
automation, but globalization, efficiency, and 18 other current or anticipatable
trends. Whether you agree or disagree
with my findings, the mass of which are still current, there is no reason for
employers to minimize automation gains by maintaining the same numbers of
pertinent workers. As well, the authors’
statement that machines will be “freeing up humans to work on more
value-creating projects” is erroneous, at least in the huge majority of fields
with good job candidates not being hired as it is.
In “Industrial robot sales hit record” (Financial Times, June 22), Michael Pooler quoted a company robotics
head as saying that “people today don’t want to do dull, dirty, dangerous and
delicate jobs any more.” I could
introduce this man to tens of thousands of Americans in my state alone who
would gladly do all of those things – if the pay were right. Almost all skills shortages are really
training and pay shortages; while those are the free choices of the companies
involved, and they are entitled to position them as workers’ shortcomings
instead, we have the final option in what we will believe.
Eduardo Porter’s June 7 New
York Times piece, “Jobs Threatened by Machines: A Once ‘Stupid’ Concern Gains Respect,”
looked at some invalid thinking on work and automation across the years, in
response to Wassily Leontief’s pithy and prescient response to those doubting
machines could take over jobs, “They replaced horses, didn’t they?” It included another economist, Kenneth S.
Rogoff, saying that “it seems unlikely that millions of workers are headed to
the glue factory like discarded horses” (why not, and why doesn’t that simile
fit?), and a comment from a young Lawrence H. Summers that productivity gains
from technology would create so many jobs from people having more money to
spend that employment would stay at least the same (sure, if there were no
products like software where cost per item drops almost as fast as the number
of items sold goes up, and if companies paid workers according to productivity
instead of on supply and demand). It is common in economics to see even eminent
practitioners saying things that, on further analysis, simply don’t make sense
– I suspect political biases for some, but don’t understand its other causes.
On June 1, The
Washington Post published Robert J. Samuelson’s “The robot invasion that
isn’t yet here.” Samuelson, who has written
much fine material, took a remarkably anti-job-loss stance here, saying that
since our country had added 14 million jobs in six-plus years “there’s little
evidence that robots have yet had much effect on job creation in the current
recovery.” That does not follow to
me. He also wrote that according to a
University of Michigan study “only 16 percent of respondents wanted
self-driving vehicles” (there were 260 million registered in the U.S. in 2014,
which works out to “only” 41.6 million).
At the end of the piece, he fell into the common trap of saying that
“workers may become scarce” when “baby boomers age and retire” (as I have
documented in no fewer than three books, most in the baby boom generation will not
voluntarily retire, and despite 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, latent
demand for work is stronger, in relation to official unemployment, than it has
ever been.)
Lilah Raptopoulos’s April 8 Financial Times compilation “Robots: friend or foe? You told us” presented readers’ comments on
robotics, with most chosen ones being excellent. One responder said that he asked his
17-year-old son if he thought his “future profession already exists.” That is not an error, but brings up an
important distinction. Even though many
specific job tasks are completely new from five or ten years before, the overall
positions change remarkably little.
Martin Ford, in The Lights in the Tunnel, documented how, in
2006, not a single American job area, except for the subset of restaurant work
labeled “fast food,” with at least one million workers was nonexistent in
1930. Obviously that could change, but
we know of no reason why it should.
Finally, an old area of automata reappeared, by Maija Palmer
on May 4th, also in Financial Times: sexbots.
Maybe my recollection is wrong, but it seemed a foregone conclusion two
decades ago that not-quite-human sex partners would be common by mid-century if
not sooner, and I have read almost nothing since. This story, “Prospect of sexual relationships
with robots poses moral dilemmas,” started almost from the beginning, with
cinematic references, currently available sex dolls with semi-robotic features,
and one commentator’s thought that “female sex robots will dehumanise women”
since “creating objects that closely resemble human females… leads men to
regard women as objects.” Well, if they
don’t resemble human females, they
won’t be too popular, so I expect the mainstream view on such things to take
two parts: one, and more than anything
else, apathy; and two, seeing such things as economic inferior goods like
bottom-grade beer.
On that not really titillating note, I wrap up. Be assured, no matter what, that robots will
take over plenty more jobs somewhere and somehow – maybe not huge amounts today
or tomorrow, but during, if you are lucky, your lifetime. Let’s think straight about them.
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