I am always amazed as to the sudden
realization that there has been a systemic change to our workforce. After all
it was no surprise. It also is a continuing trend of history. Just go through New England
mill towns, and what do you see, old mill factories
which 100 years or so ago made fabrics, then became abandoned and then became
high tech start-ups and now house health care
establishments! The trend is just read by the signs on the buildings (see Lowell, MA for example). But that trend is frightening.
Robots replace manual labor and for a
while entrepreneurs came in, then they left and are replaced by Health Care,
namely innovation replaced by overhead! That should be the concern. We are not
getting healthier, we are just spending more.
Now Friedman of the NY Times seems always
to bring his new insights to the table. Frankly I never seen any true insights but alas he is
what the masses of the left have to rely upon. They would be better off driving
about I 495 in Boston and reading signs. From Friedman today in the Times we have[1]:
WHEN you hear the insane notion of “legitimate rape”
being aired by a Republican congressman — a member of the House science
committee no less — it makes you wonder some days how we became the world’s
richest, most powerful country, and, more important, how we’re going to stay
there. The short answer is that, thank God, there’s still a bunch of people
across America — innovators and entrepreneurs — who just didn’t get the word.
They didn’t get the word that Germany will eat our breakfast or that China will
eat our lunch. They didn’t get the word that we’re in a recession and heading
for a fiscal cliff. They’re not interested in politics at all. Instead, they
just go out and invent stuff and fix stuff and collaborate on stuff. They are
our saving grace, and whenever I need a pick-me-up, I drop in on one of them.
I did just that last week, visiting
the design workshop of Rethink Robotics, near Boston’s airport, where I did
something I’ve never done before: I programmed a robot to perform the simple
task of moving widgets from one place to another. Yup, I trained the robot’s
arms using a very friendly screen interface and memory built into its
mechanical limbs. …
The Rethink design team includes …, the product manager
of the Apple LaserWriter — as well as 75 other experts from Russia, Georgia,
Venezuela, Egypt, Australia, India, Israel, Portugal, Britain, Sri Lanka, the
United States and China. “It is all made in America,” …, but by “the best
talent” gathered “from around the world.”
This is the company of the future.
Forget about “outsourcing.” In today’s hyperconnected world, there is no “in”
and no “out.” There’s only “good, better and best,” and if you don’t assemble
the best team you can from everywhere, your competitor will. …
The Rethink robot will be unveiled
in weeks. I was just given a sneak peek — on the condition that I did not
mention its “disruptive” price point and some other unique features.
This is the march of progress. It eliminates bad jobs,
empowers good jobs, but always demands more skill and creativity and always
enables fewer people to do more things. We went through the same megashift when
our agricultural economy was replaced by the industrial economy in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, what this election should be about is
how we spawn thousands of Rethinks that create new industries, new jobs and
productivity tools. Alas, it isn’t. So I’m just grateful these folks here in
Boston didn’t get the word.
Sarcasm as
required starts his “insights” but
he seems to have not read history and moreover has not truly thought through
what he opines upon. Robots replace humans; it
is akin to the plow, the tractor, and the changes in farms a hundred or
so years ago. But now there are no big cities to go to. Furthermore these
robots have been around for ages and there is no secret sauce that gives the US
any sustainable advantage.
Now in reality the message was originally sent by Norbert Wiener. In 1947 he wrote his first warnings about
this change and in 1961 he repeated it. From Wiener,
Cybernetics, 2nd Edition, we have:
Long before Nagasaki and the public
awareness of the atomic bomb, it had occurred to me that we were here in the
presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil. The automatic factory and the assembly line without human
agents are only so far ahead of us as is limited by our willingness to put such
a degree of effort into their engineering as was spent, for example, in the
development of the technique of radar in the Second World War.[2]
I have said that this new development has
unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the
metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most
immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a
new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor.
Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor,
although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the
conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave
labor, and is essentially slave labor. The key word of this statement is competition.
It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial
and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for
these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the
money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market,
the "fifth freedom," that have become the shibboleth of the sector of
American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and
the Saturday Evening Post. I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary.
Perhaps I may clarify the historical
background of the present situation if I say that the first industrial
revolution, the revolution of the "dark satanic mills," was the
devaluation of the human arm by the competition of
machinery. There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-shovel
laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel
as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine
decisions.
Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the
skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may
survive the second. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the
average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that
it is worth anyone's money to buy.
The answer, of course, is to have a
society based on human values other than buying or selling. To arrive at this society, we need a good
deal of planning and a good deal of struggle,
which, if the best comes to the best, may be on the plane of ideas, and
otherwise—who knows? I thus felt it my
duty to pass on my information and understanding of the position to those who
have an active interest in the conditions and the future of labor, that is, to the labor unions. I did manage to make contact with one
or two persons high up in the C.I.O., and from them I received a very
intelligent and sympathetic hearing.
Further than these individuals, neither I nor any of them was able to
go.
It
was their opinion, as it had been my previous observation and information, both
in the United States and in England, that the labor unions and the labor
movement are in the hands of a highly limited personnel, thoroughly well
trained in the specialized problems of shop stewardship and
disputes concerning wages and conditions of work, and totally unprepared to
enter into the larger political, technical, sociological, and economic
questions which concern the very existence of labor.
The reasons for this are easy enough to see: the labor union official generally comes from
the exacting life of a workman into the exacting life of an administrator
without any opportunity for a broader training; and for those who have this
training, a union career is not generally inviting; nor, quite
naturally, are the unions receptive to such people.
Those of us who have contributed to the
new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position which is, to say the
least, not very comfortable. We have
contributed to the initiation of a new science which, as I
have said, embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good
and for evil. We can only hand it over
into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and
Hiroshima.
We do not even
have the choice of suppressing these new technical developments. They belong to the age, and the most any of
us can do by suppression is to put the development of the subject into the
hands of the most irresponsible and most venal of our engineers. The best we can do is to see that a
large public understands the trend and the bearing of the
present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields, such as
physiology and psychology, most remote from war and exploitation.
Wiener was ages ahead of Friedman. Wiener was
not only the visionary but the oracle of what was to happen, and in addition
the one who started the whole process. Perhaps Friedman should read more of
Wiener and add that to his insight.
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