The robots are coming, and they will eventually fill most every manufacturing and service niche. That probably includes yours. There might be some scattered fields that escape for a while; artists of various sort might be safe. But outside of a few occupations like songwriter or human athlete, sooner or later robots will take over every single job and master every field currently occupied by people. The reasons are simple: Machines will be cheaper, way safer, orders of magnitude faster, and probably smarter in that narrow context (or in general) than any human could possibly be.
It might take 20 years to complete, or it might take a century. But once it gets in gear it will probably accelerate quickly, and there are signs that that process has already started:
In the first five or more years, following the introduction of autonomous vehicles, the need for human drivers will actually increase, not decrease, wrote Zimmer. “As more people trade their keys for Lyft, the overall market will grow dramatically. When autonomous cars can only solve a portion of those trips, more Lyft drivers will be needed to provide service to the growing market of former car owners,” according to Zimmer.
Machines replacing human workers are nothing new, as that story has been around for generations. But what’s coming is something we have never seen before—and not many have bothered to think through. Billions of people may get caught flat-footed by a new shift in human subsistence strategy, one as fundamental as any that has come before. It’s not anarchy, it’s sure not socialism or communism, and while it may start out as an outgrowth of capitalism, it will not stay that way for long. It’s not any -ism that exists in our vocabulary now.
It is the robot economy, large scale autonomous automation. We humbly suggest calling it autonomism. Call it what you will, but it will be revolutionary by any name. Come below and we’ll speculate more on why.
Prototype industrial robots were developed just before and just after World War II. By the ‘70s they became ubiquitous enough as workplace surrogates that unions began to worry. But for decades after those bots were limited to narrow, specifically defined tasks like spot welding or lifting heavy components on and off of lines. They went on to become heroes or villains in our collective consciousness, but that was mostly thanks to movies like Star Wars and Terminator.
We can foresee that the robots now looming on the horizon will be far more sophisticated than anything we have had to date, and that is no longer the purview of science fiction. We can already predict they’ll soon be able to pilot all of our vehicles and do basic chores, and take on other jobs now deemed too dangerous for humans—all of which sounds wonderful, until we extrapolate the trend further and start thinking about the broader economic fallout and individual casualties:
Apple and Samsung supplier Foxconn has reportedly replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots. One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post. Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: "More companies are likely to follow suit." China is investing heavily in a robot workforce.
That’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This time around, machines won’t stop at factory worker. When voice recognition comes fully into its own, that will be the end of most call center jobs, with interpreters queuing up right behind them in the ranks of unemployed. They won’t stop there either. It won’t stop at maid or cook, or at disarming bombs. Robots will go on to be roofers and plumbers, surgeons and engineers, bankers and lawyers, perhaps surrogate fathers and mothers, and maybe eventually something even more intimate and little bit gross.
They will invade every single job you can imagine and create new ones. They will be capable of doing any of those jobs better and cheaper than any human could ever match. How that will play out in warfare or urban control is a meaty subject on its own. A machine that can drive a car can pilot a tank, a device that can fly a commercial airplane can run a fighter bomber thru speeds and turns that would turn human bones into bloody paste. No matter what your job is now, don’t assume they can’t replace you, too. They probably can and given time, they almost certainly will. It’s alarming to speculate on what that could lead to.
Imagine an AI with a network of semi-autonomous “cogs” running an industry for a profit. The programming might start out narrowly focused, but their resources and planning ability could become virtually infinite by puny human standards. Just a couple of sobering examples: If an AI were running a for-profit prison, it might quickly deduce that more arrests equal more convictions which means more profit. One that profited from catastrophes might engineer those very phenomena.
Think of the ways a mechanical sociopath could game that system. It might be able to hack into a police or court system database and fabricate or erase documents of any kind, thus generating a false criminal record. Or an AI running a clean-up company—or even a government department dedicated to the same role—might figure a great way to boost revenues would be to hack into a giant automated truck convoy carrying one binary explosive or chemical component, and smash it into a freight train carrying the other binary agent to create an unprecedented (and very profitable) disaster.
It doesn’t matter if the AI is really conscious, or mere mimicry. It won’t matter to the job at hand or the larger result if they are Chinese Rooms or a vault of genuine super-consciousness. Those are fascinating topics to be sure. But all that matters to the economic outcome, initially, is if they and/or their cogs can do a given job, learn to partly or completely repair themselves, and eventually be capable of designing and building their own descendants—all with little or no human guidance.
But the immediate gaping question is: What happens to the billions of people thrown out of work by mechanical slaves taking over every role, and what happens to the global economy those workers currently support with their hard-earned paychecks? There’s plenty of speculation, but no one really knows the answer to any of that. Most mainstream policy wonks won’t even recognize the possibility, much less address it. The few who do mostly explain, with ever more fanciful reasons, why it can never happen.
There’s a reason people shy away from the issue. In our relatively short history on Earth as anatomically modern humans along with our more recent ancestors, there have been a few key developments that forever changed how we live as a species: the manufacture and use of simple tools, the domestication of fire, eons of artificial selection of plants and animals eventually making farming and ranching possible, writing and mathematics, and the industrial revolution. The change now looming ahead could be as big as any of those.
But odds are you’re going to be living through this change and get a peek at what’s on the other side of what many writers have called the technological singularity. So it might be a good idea to start thinking about it now, while we make the rules about who owns what , who will benefit, and who or what will not. The alternative is just letting matters sort themselves out with no planning or forethought of any kind.
It’s a wide open field of near future speculation, science fiction, and cyber-punk stirring to life before our old-fashioned jelly, gooey eyes. So have at it: What do you think will happen, and what can you put forward to support it?