Mo Betta Robots

Our future robot overlords... will still be our servants:

Before the 20th century, most folks in the West farmed. Now, thanks to massive productivity gains in agriculture, virtually none do. To a 19th century farmer that would imply nothing less than the collapse of the economy. Why? Because the thing most people did back then was farm. Our farmer might understandably wonder, “What will we do when machines perform our jobs for us? How will we make money? How will we survive?”

We are gifted with the vision of our times and cursed with the temptation to extrapolate that vision into the future. How could our farmer know that in 2013 humans would be paid to make movies, pick up garbage, write online, build robots, clean bathrooms, engineer rockets, lead guided tours, drive trucks, play in garage bands, brew artisanal beer, or write code?

The revolution in agricultural technology liberated vast resources and made us all richer and the economy more diverse as a result. And while one might think that those riches should have accrued to only those making agricultural tech, thus permanently widening the income gap, no such thing happened in practice. While those making agricultural machinery undoubtedly made some bucks, the next economic waves provided different work and income for many levels of skill and motivation.

While the example may be a bit simplistic, the point is valid. Over forty years ago, Gene Roddenberry posited that in the not-too-distant future, machines would free humans to do what humans want to do, instead of what we have to do in order to survive. For the last five thousand years (i.e., recorded history) technology and wealth creation have been slowly but surely moving humanity away from a hand-to-mouth existence. First it was just a few so-called "nobles," then the craftsman class, then the merchants and lawyers. With the bad (see: lawyers) comes the good; the average inhabitant in the West has far, far more free time than the average serf of a thousand years ago. We don't have to work sun-up to sun-down seven days per week in order to make enough to feed our families, tithe the church, and support the nobility. In fact, that average person has more leisure time than what they spend at work each week. Sure, some of it's sleeping, but most working adults only sleep six hours per night, while electrical lighting has enabled us to turn the night time into our leisure time.

There are bumps in the road, of course. Cheap, portable computers have enabled the employee to do more than ever, and he is therefore expected to do so. I've done my share of sixty- and eighty-hour weeks, as I'm sure you have. That's the price for success, it seems. But there's the promise of retirement -- another very recent social invention -- at the end of the road. I'm not even going to discuss welfare and other politically-motivated problems current in Western society, as they are ultimately self-correcting in nature -- though the correction won't be any fun for anyone. Even if the United States crumbles into constituent parts, others will pick up the trail and move forward. We've stumbled before: the Dark Ages are the most obvious example, but they were followed by the Enlightenment. No, I'm talking here about the long-term future, not what the life of your children or grandchildren will be like. While corrupt and selfish politicians are as old as the aforementioned recorded history, and there is no doubt we are cursed with a particularly noxious crop of them in America right now, even they can't stop the momentum generated by billions upon billions of human beings over many centuries. You will note, however, the implied distinction between human beings and politicians.

I don't foresee a future in which nobody works, but I do think the trend will continue towards doing what we want to do more often than what we have to do. Honestly, does anyone really want to work on an assembly line? Of course not. Our work will increasingly be a labor of our choosing. Some of the people I know who are happiest in their jobs are those who took a significant pay cut in order to change careers, often in middle age. One of them is a contributor to this blog. The other, my uncle, recently passed on.

Uncle Robert quit a very lucrative career in business at the age of 47 in order to pursue his childhood dream of being a police officer. He was delightfully happy for the last 17 years of his life, doing what he had always wanted to do, even though he made only a tiny fraction of his former income. That was because he lived in a society where he wasn't socially stratified. Changing what he did -- I would even say who he was -- was simply a matter of deciding that the trade-offs were worth it to him personally. I daresay no serf in history every had that opportunity, but every citizen of America has it; whether or not we avail ourselves of it is our choice. This doesn't mean a janitor can become a brain surgeon, but it does means he can go to night school to learn a trade.

The current attempts of politicians to kill the golden goose notwithstanding, there is a very good chance that our descendents three generations on may look back in horror at the idea of a forty-hour work week, let alone those hours being spent working on an assembly line like some kind of biological robot -- which is essentially what an assembly line worker really is. The very idea will be as repellent to them as farming a mud plot under the heel of economic slavery. They will be far more interested in doing things which we can't imagine, any more than a medieval peasant could have imagined the relatively fairy tale-like existence of a modern white collar worker. And that, as they say, is progress.