Robot Road

Many people are familiar, at least in passing with the term "Luddite." For those who aren't, Luddism was essentially a working class insurgency in 19th century Britain, which arose from dissatisfaction over skilled weavers being systematically replaced by unskilled labor using weaving machines. People would wreck machines, threaten factory owners, and even went so far as to battle with elements of the British army that were sent to suppress them. While arguments over the Luddites' motives are still debated, the consensus view generally is that the Luddites were not averse to the introduction of machines, but to the effects of the machines -- lowered wages, the inability to value labor correctly, and the impact it would have on them and their families. In other words, they feared the basic loss of ability to survive. Luddism eventually died out as the introduction of machines made it possible to more fully exploit natural resources and the economy expanded wildly for around two hundred years.

Fast forward to the modern age. There have been a few instances of discontent and grumbling about the replacement of workers in various industries by robots, but this was largely offset by the fact that people were able to find employment in other industries, such as the service industry and the technological fields, which were riding off of the accumulated capital of the last few centuries. Now, that same store of capital is slowly drying up, and the ability of people to be able to find other forms of employment are going with it. In the face of twenty to twenty-five percent real unemployment, the question of what technology has done to the labor force is beginning to be thrown around again.  This article goes into detail about what effects there have been on the labor force as we approach a sort of "mini-singularity" in terms of where we are with automation and human labor. There are some real howlers, such as the notion that everyone should graduate high school by 2020. What for? So they can be educated enough to know why they're never going to find meaningful work or anything but a survival existence? Also brought up is the idea that there should be a guaranteed minimum income for people. How does that work, as well, when we have more debt than all of human civilization's past debts put together? There are also some sobering bits, such as people dipping into their retirement to make ends meet, which is the all-too-familiar story of people clinging to the edge of the cliff by their fingertips.

The late Jane Jacobs, in her book "Dark Age Ahead," went into some detail about the idea of "cultural amnesia." Without going into much detail, the general concept was that we either "used it or losed it" (bad grammer intended) when it came to various skills and ideas. I suspect that it may be a relic of human evolution, where the "old ways" were abandoned, so we didn't waste time doing things that didn't work for us. Consider, for example, that people are suggesting that the medical field may be largely automated at some point. This isn't a crazy notion -- lots of surgery is now being done with remotely-operated machines. However, what happens to the knowledge of the medical profession? Are those ideas slowly lost as times goes on and replaced by "go see the robot." What happens when the robot isn't around? Will the idea of germ theory, for example, die out in a generation?

Where does all of this leave the average person, too? It's increasingly clear that we are going to face a divide at some point -- either be in the part of humanity that services and develops technology, or be a part of humanity that scrambles for what is left, whatever that is. Truck driver? Good luck, with rising fuel costs and the development of reliable robotic vehicles on the horizon. Teacher? Good luck, with increasingly sophisticated educational software being developed. Soldier? Drones and robots are free to train, can be deployed indefinitely, and don't cause problems for politicians by coming home in flag-draped coffins. And, for those who want to start a little niche business, how many cake decorating places, photo studios, and baristas can a largely unemployed populace support, anyway? We are either part of the mechanism of technology or we are going to be displaced by it -- there is no middle ground.

All this comes at a catch, though -- our material resources are running out, in spite of what we're told. Oil is increasingly hard to retrieve. Metals are getting more expensive as the easily-accessible stocks have long since been made into other things, or just plain used up in industrial production. People are trying to exploit the resources in space now, but will that program end before it ever gets off the ground? Are we going to have robots that run on thin air? Are they going to be powered by "cost savings?" The more advanced our production architecture becomes, the more reliant it becomes on the infrastructure to support it. Eventually, we will merge back into one humanity -- those who placed their hopes on robotics and lost out due to thermodynamic realities, and those who were displaced by robotics and just "made do." People will have a new shared interest in trying to find enough to eat and to have a roof over their head.

If nothing else, it begins to remind us that we still need to have one foot in each world -- the world where technology and magic reign, where we still tryi to find work and a means to survive in modern society, and a foot in the world where we accept regressive change, in spite of our optimism and good intentions. If we have a job that can potentially be replaced by technology, we need to understand that we may at some point be permanently out of work and need to plan for that possibility. If we work in a technological field, we probably have more a "cushion," but have to understand that it will not last forever. What replacement skills can we find for ourselves? Most of all, it's time for everyone to try and maintain the collective memory of how things were done before there was technology to make them happen -- how did we heal a broken bone before we had x-rays? How did we plant a field before there was a tractor and industrial fertilizer? As people who understand the party can't go on forever, this is our praxis and we need to remind ourselves of the importance of it, even as our technological civilization plays Icarus with the future.