Robot Workers' Real Draw: Reducing Dependence on Human Workers

HughPickens.com writes: Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NY Times that machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who's in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren't used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a "good enough" job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."

According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers' dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we've been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. Tufekci points out that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."

Comments

Whatsisname is...mistaken

[CrimsonAvenger]

He may well believe that past results are no indication of future results, there's one overwhelmingly important fact that comes to mind: noone will be able to buy the stuff made in the robot factories if we're all unemployed or minimum wage serfs.

And if noone can buy the stuff, the owners aren't going to get rich selling the stuff. Which means THEY won't be able to buy stuff either....

Re:Whatsisname is...mistaken

[DigiShaman]

Excellent questions and underlaying premise. On the face of it logically, yeah, I would tend to agree. But, the issue here is psychological in human nature. The ultra wealthy tend to be decadent, arrogant, condescending, and overall live in a warped reality from the rest of us. Often when they feel guilty under fear of shame, they will propose changes in lifestyles for everyone else except for themselves (see carbon trading, and other environmental movements along with public health). They truly live with double standards. In fact, we see it today with our most power politicians in office and the corporate masters that collude with them. At the end of the day, the ultra wealthy have are beyond material wealth. For these select few of powerful people, their lives have to continue to matter; so they face inward towards the rest of society. And now I leave you and everyone else with the following quote.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

-C.S. Lewis

Re:Whatsisname is...mistaken

[alvinrod]

Let's put you in such a position where you are one of these powerful elite who owns or controls a large amount of robotic power, enough that you can provide comfortably for some arbitrarily large (even all of humanity if you'd like) number of people.

Let's further suppose that only about 3% of these people will ever be capable of providing some service that's materially beneficial to you or that your robots are currently incapable of doing. Further suppose another 3% can produce something that has no material value but is aesthetically pleasing to you.

What would you do if you found yourself in such a position? You have the current wealth to provide comfortably for everyone, cast off those who are not useful to you (peacefully or violently) and provide more resources for the small number of individuals who are useful, or you could even isolate yourself from everyone else if you wanted. You might even start giving individuals who didn't own robots their own robot so that they could become like you.

If you know how you would answer that question, under what circumstances would you expect some other arbitrary individual in the same circumstance to choose differently? If you don't expect yourself to be overly evil or oppressive towards others what makes you expect that almost everyone else in the position would be? What would they gain from it? Certainly nothing of material value so unless they want to be some kind of petty ruler or act like a god, or are outright evil for whatever reason there isn't much rational reason for their behavior.

At best you could say that those in power fear what those who are not would do if they could wield similar power and therefore they seek to deprive others of it, but in a world where keeping serfs doesn't benefit you because they are cheap labor, anyone who reasons such is more likely to just kill off everyone else rather than keeping them around as some kind of underclass. That outcomes reminds me of Asimov's Solaria where a small number of people with massive amounts of robot labor isolate themselves from everyone else.

It just seems as though the only reason to keep a perpetual underclass around is for the sake of some individual's own sick mind. Something similar to North Korea perhaps. Most of the selfish people would go for either the Solaria or the Atlas Shrugged strategies.

And upping the Dependence on welfare / medicaid

[Joe_Dragon]

And upping the Dependence on welfare / medicaid as well for some more Dependence on jail for a place to sleep / get food / get a doctor.

We need to work on basic income and universal health care be for removing even more jobs. Also do something about student loans / some kind of badges systems that makes so you don't have to go back to school for years at high cost to get a piece a paper so you can get a new job.

Forward thinking...

[SJ]

So... who exactly is going to buy all of these things when no one has any money because all the jobs have been replaced by robots?

the endgame is ironic here

[circletimessquare]

if the ultimate capitalist pursuit of removing all human workers results in production without any cost, then they have delivered the ultimate socialist utopia: everything costs $0, no one having to work

all that has to be removed is the mendacity that will still seek rent for the existing machinery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Re:the endgame is ironic here

[meta-monkey]

Getting there. I could see a robot farm, a 3D printer that can build a not-uncomfortable dwelling, power from solar and batteries...entertainment can already be achieved for free. Might not be the lap of luxury, but I think within 10-15 years, one could build a community wherein zero work (or an extremely small number of maintenance hours) could be required, and humans sustainably live. It won't be super comfy. But the options would no longer be limited to work, die, or burden the community.

Re:the endgame is ironic here

[circletimessquare]

1. no, capitalism is not anarchy. the endpoint is plutocracy: high corruption, a few ultrarich, and a sea of poor

2. that abuse exists independent of capitalism doesn't say anything for or against capitalism. that's a pretty dumb red herring. capitalism of course creates certain kinds of abuse. many other abuses exist outside capitalism. duh

3. capitalism created unions in the late 1800s. people were becoming slaves (charged more for the company food and housing than the money they made, in essence paying to work). no holidays, no time off, child slavery, no worker safety, etc. unions exist simply because without anyone advocating for workers, companies would happily abuse workers. uinions themselves have many abuses. as if those abuses are worse than a slave holding corporation

4. a government is controlled by its people. it's called democracy. a *corrupt* government is controlled by corporations. so you want to remove the *corruption* not the *government. get it? if you weaken the government, who fills the power vacuum? corporations do. the ones corrupting your government. hello?

never in a million years do i understand this deranged notion:

"corporations corrupt my democracy, so government is evil"

wtf? it's like:

"someone robbed the bank by bribing the security guard. so from now on we will have no security at banks. that way our money will be safe from robbers... what did you ask? go after the robbers? nah, forget about them. just fire the bad guard and hire a new good guard? that's crazy talk"

why are so many people so deranged on this point? corporations are your enemy, not government. they are the ones corrupting your government. plenty of countries have laws against corruption that works. you can't remove all corruption but you can do far, far better than the USA's legalized corruption

A government controlled economy is like having huge corporations with armies, police forces and courts with little or no recourse for whatever plight you may have.

(facepalm)

how the fuck can you have it exactly backwards from the truth?

weak government means corporations control the army, police force, and courts with little or no recourse. with your government, you're arrested, tried, and freed/ jailed. there's a process to protect you. the process can fuck up, but why is NO process somehow better? what recourse do you have against an army controlled by corporations?

is that science fiction i'm talking about? consider dickface plutocrat cheney and his blackwater crew and then consider this real american history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Pinkerton's agents performed services ranging from security guarding to private military contracting work. Pinkerton was the largest private law enforcement organization in the world at the height of its power.[3] By the early 1890s, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency employed more agents than there were members of the standing army of the United States of America.

During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, as well as recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers. One such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie. The ensuing battle between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to the deaths of seven Pinkerton agents and nine steelworkers.[4] The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. The organization was pejoratively called the "Pinks" by its opponents.

More common that humans are turned into robots

[Big_Breaker]

Companies have gotten really good a simplifying human jobs so that new hires with few skills can be quickly trained up to replace underperforming or otherwise problematic workers. There are high paying management jobs (a few of them) for producing and optimizing employment manuals, procedures, performance targets and input kiosks so that the absolute lowest common denominator hire can quickly fill a void.

As an example McDonalds "upgraded" their order taking turrets from using words for each food item to pictures for each food item. That meant they could employ people who couldn't read, because I guess literacy was a limiting requirement in their hiring process. McDonalds employs over 400,000 people. Just a small "savings" across that employment base is worth millions. That millions of savings get's split between shareholders and the top tier of management who designs and implements these "process enhancements".

And the new thing is to order online from your smartphone and pick it up at the counter. That gets rid of the order taker entirely and you can staff with mostly "behind the scenes" worker bees that don't even have to speak English. That is until you can get a robot to make the food too.

Call centers have been doing this for years with average call time metrics, flow charts for addressing caller needs, etc... It's happening in lots and lots of industries now.

Re:Education is a red herring

[swb]

But who's making money off those smartphone games at $1 a pop? All we hear about is how nobody makes money on them.

I've heard more than a few serious economists (ie, real academics who aren't mass-media brand names) sound kind of nervous about automation's role in shrinking the number of jobs. Few of them seem ready to entirely disown the notion that automating one set of tasks frees up labor for new economic expansions where the tasks can't be easily automated.

Where they seem to get nervous is over the fact that the jobs increasingly eliminated by automation are jobs that previously required a lot of education and were high wage, white collar jobs. And they're not being replaced by new jobs of the same type, they're being replaced by low-wage jobs that require hard to automate manual skills -- when they're being replaced at all.

The new high wage white collar jobs being produced often require the kind of extensive training and experience extremely difficult for mid-career professionals to obtain, which is compounded by the rate of jobs being automated.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the notion of a broad middle class is a kind of historical accident caused by the confluence of growth in technology, wide and cheap resource availability and high labor demand. We may be nearing the end of the middle class as we've known it and mostly like it, and returning to a more historical pattern of broad poverty and narrow wealth.