Manufacturing jobs won't cut it in automated world

It may be a while before robots blend in at dinner parties, win an election, or discuss the nature of selfhood with their human handlers as envisioned in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction. But though they aren’t (yet) taking over the world, robots are quietly taking over our jobs.

They don’t look much like Asimov’s robots, but they’re working in manufacturing, warehouses, software. One example is the driverless trucks that could soon put millions of truckers out of work. There are even driverless tractors, as if we needed to get rid of more agriculture workers.

A study from University of Oxford researchers, in fact, estimates up to 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at risk of being automated in the next 20 years.

That’s a long way from all of the jobs, of course. We’ll still need people to keep the robots in good working order, as long as they don’t come up with a robot that can do that. But if the pace of automation outstrips the number of new jobs – and 47 percent in 20 years would – our lumbering economy may not able to adjust in time to prevent a crisis, just as it’s done a poor job of adjusting to the changes in manufacturing so far. (For examples, see “Rust Belt.”)

There will also be many workers who won’t have the skills to build or fix robots. What happens to them?

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In a late December article in the New Yorker, “Our Automated Future: How long will it be until you lose your job to a robot?”, Elizabeth Kolbert took a look at recent books exploring these topics. She pointed out that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigned against companies moving jobs overseas.

But though that got the crowds excited, can we really go back to a golden age of American manufacturing? Manufacturing jobs are exactly the ones being automated, Kolbert wrote.

She cited MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.”

“Off-shoring jobs ... is often just a ‘way station’ on the road to eliminating them entirely,” they say.

So what options do we have, besides giving up and moving to a cabin in Montana? Attempts to suppress new technology to save old jobs have never worked very well, as the weavers and cobblers and small farmers made irrelevant by the Industrial Revolution could tell you.

Yet the idea of divorcing labor and income, guaranteeing money regardless of the work you do or don’t do, grates against human values. For millennia, we’ve learned the truth of the idea that “he who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Just the thought of a guaranteed income raises the specter of lots of lazy people sitting around golfing all day, not bothering to contribute anything to society.

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We don’t have to use our imaginations to see what this would be like. A small number of people have been doing it for a long time. There were the nobles, who enjoyed food and goods produced by peasants. Then it was slaveowners and the factory owners who profited from the same model.

If it’s laziness you’re worried about, the entitled children of billionaires can turn out to be some of the most lazy and unproductive people in the world.

Yet some billionaires don’t act that way. People like Bill Gates and Elon Musk certainly could sit around on their yachts or devote their intellect to lowering their golf handicap; instead, they keep on working for the good of society. (It remains to be seen how useful their heirs, born with the proverbial golden spoon in their mouths, will be).

It’s time to take a serious look at making sure people have a decent income – better than welfare, whether or not they have a job. Freeing up most people in the world to pursue the life and work they choose, without worrying about survival, might sound like a utopian dream. But the age of robots is here, and they are only going to get more sophisticated.

If we don’t figure out a way to get people an income, what we’ll have is a lot of people sitting around neither working nor getting any income. That’s a deadly danger to any society.

Andrew Sharp is a producer at The Daily Times and delmarvanow.com. Email him at asharp@dmg.gannett.com. Find him on Twitter @buckeye_201 and on Facebook @andrewsharp201.