Automation, Inequality, and Public Policy This summer (in 10 days!) I will be teaching a summer program for 40 high school students where they will learn to create 3D Games from scratch, including all of the models and animations for the characters and the objects in their games. For the first time in my career, I will also be teaching them how to use a 3D Printer to transform their digital creations into real tangible 3D objects involving multiple materials. These devices cost around $1000 and the materials they use are pretty cheap too. When combined with a digital scanner (also about $1000) you get a pretty good imitation of the Star Trek transporter for inanimate objects... This technology is maturing extremely rapidly. There are people in China who are using it to print houses with almost no human interaction dezeen/2014/04/24/chinese-company-3d-prints-buildings-construction-waste/ and there are others who are developing plans to entirely automate the construction of large buildings (including skyscrapers) at a fraction of the cost with much greater material strength and architectural flexibility wimp/printerhouse/ This has the potential to completely revolutionize the construction industry by removing almost all human labor from the process. Automation is rapidly advancing in other ways including entire factories that are fully automated, e.g. Cannon is planning a fully robotic plant for some of its Cameras singularityhub/2012/06/06/canon-camera-factory-to-go-fully-automated-phase-out-human-workers/ This process even has a name .. lights out manufacturing which refers to the fact that the factory runs 24 hours a day with no lights because there are no humans involved en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) Google recently announced that it is developing robotically driven cars and has logged over 300,000 miles of robotic driving on city streets en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car IBM has created a computer system, Watson, that can beat humans playing Jeopardy showing that even jobs that require intellectual power could possibly be automated en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) and IBM is rapidly exploring what kinds of white collar jobs can be automated by Watson. Although I love all of this amazing innovation and the way it can free us from dangerous or monotonous jobs, the rise of cost effective automation also makes it pretty clear that the human labor market is going to be rapidly underbid by robots in the near future and if we do nothing about it, we will see widespread unemployment combined with a rapid increase in the wealth of the owners of the companies that produce these products and a rapid decrease in the wealth of people that dont own such companies. My thesis here is that automation, without a significant change in public policy, is going to result in rapidly accelerating income and wealth inequality and the rise of a society with a small, extremely wealthy and powerful upper class and a large, poor, starving lower class with little to no available options for work that cant be done better, cheaper, and faster by a machine; and no middle class at all. When I was young, I remember being told that automation would lead to increased leisure and eventually to a society where we could devote our lives to the arts and creativity and discovery. This could yet be true, but only if we as a society make it happen. I am not a luddite. I want to see these technologies continue, but I also want us to confront, as a society, the problems that are arising. In 1900 the vast majority of people worked in agriculture but 100 years later that number had dropped below 5%. In the next 25 years or less, we are going to see almost all forms of physical labor replaced by faster, more reliable, less expensive robotic devices and most conventional jobs as we know them will be obsolete. One silver lining is that we are starting to learn how to create 3D printers that can print themselves (with some assembly required) and this suggests that we could move to a society where we dont need to buy any manufactured products from large corporations. We could have a society where each home is self-sufficient except that it needs the raw foods to create meals and raw materials to print objects. In this society, the new utilities would be companies that supplied the raw materials.... Each community could generate its power locally through solar, wind, and other renewables. Im excited about seeing the changes that are coming, but I fear there will be some painful years as we readjust and we need to be careful that the upper class doesnt seize control and outlaw the self-sufficiency measures that are coming. For example, there are proposals by ALEC (a conservative business-friendly group) to charge fees to homeowners that add solar panels as they are cutting into the electric utilities business model theguardian/world/2013/dec/04/alec-freerider-homeowners-assault-clean-energy Sorry that I dont have any proposed solutions, just a lot of interesting (to me) observations about what is happening now and what these trends portend, and a general call to think about the future!
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 21:00:47 +0000
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