Are we ready for robots?
I’ve been living in Vietnam for the last four years, and I get the sense that some people here are generally excited about robots and automation. They can imagine a world where robots do most of the work while they sit back and enjoy life. I’m the one who always adds “hopefully” to statements like this. Back in the US, we talk about how robots will disrupt economies and take jobs away from people. Retailers, for example, are using automatic check-out systems to cut costs and improve efficiency without considering or perhaps caring about the impact on human life.
So will tech help enrich our lives?
Unless there is a fundamental shift in thinking about what it means to be a citizen, then probably not. In the US, we have both abandoned homes and homeless. We have food surpluses and starvation. We have this belief that unless you work, you don’t deserve these things. You must be a productive citizen. In Vietnam, this is also generally true. People think if you don’t have to work, then you’ll be lazy.
If we believe that, then how can automation enrich society as a whole?
Sure, there will be some new jobs created to help manage these things, but they are eliminating an entire class of workers. It will be another mode of production that concentrates wealth into those that own it.
Karl Marx argued that in hunter-gatherer societies, things were based on relative equal social relations and communal ownership. In these societies, however, we battled nature. Our lives consisted of trying to find enough food to survive. As societies developed, we were able to escape these restraints but created new social ones to bind us. So here we are, we produce enough food, but are still starving, because despite having enough, not everyone deserves it. With robots and automation, we may escape some new social restraints, but we’ll just continue to create new ones. Class inequality will be even more drastic than it is now, and of course all of that will be compounded by other social identities like race, gender, and ability.
If we want to ensure that tech will enrich our societies, then we have to actively do something about it. Google’s motto of “Don’t be evil” sounds nice, but people don’t have to be evil to destroy other people’s lives. If things just continue to go the way they are, then they will. We don’t need bad guys, just people who are complacent. There are always reports of how Google and Apple are not diverse, but in tech, there is a very strong sentiment that “the best always get hired.” That these aren’t real problems. There is rarely a critique of why this happens and too few organizations acting to counteract them.
“Evil prevails when good men fail to act”. Edmund Burke 1729–1797
We need to recognize that social inequality exists, and we need to shift our understanding of what it means to be part of this world and what responsibilities we have to each other if we want tech to enrich the lives of the everyone.
