What Will Americans Do About an Automated Workforce?
Among the many reasons to lament the rise of Donald Trump in this year’s presidential contest is how far his candidacy has shifted the national conversation from just about anything specific. Trump’s public appearances — blustering hourlong episodes of the most dreadfully racist daytime TV show imaginable — offer no more in the realm of substance than the real estate mogul’s solemn word that, “We’re gonna be so great!” with little in terms of how? The crowds at Trump’s events: a population of Americans that everyone has recently grown comfortable calling, “The Working Class,” could use those answers the most. Trump’s show-stealing antics, and fear of answering questions, serve only to delay a conversation we should desperately be having in this country: what the hell are we going to do when the robots take our jobs?
This isn’t to overstate the severity to which we should be concerned about losing jobs to automatons. It’s reasonable to believe that such rapturous changes won’t be occurring for the next decade and even then, it’d be impossible to know just what effects these technologies will have. Things do become worrisome, though, when you think as far (or as close, depending on your perspective) as eight years from now, when Donald Trump could be in his second term as president. Worrisome, still, when you think of what has already happened in that span of time. An entire industry now exists for people to rent the homes in which they live to strangers on vacation. Thousands of people lease vehicles in order to shuttle urban dwellers about, at the behest of an app! You can pay for your pizza with emoji, and on and on.
Since Obama’s election in 2008, dozens of tech companies with staggering valuations have emerged as arbiters of a significantly different type of economy. Uber, for its part, has broadened both the scope and definition of the term “freelancer,” with drivers providing job fundamentals like a car, gas, and maintenance with the money they make from the company, and living off of the remainder. Companies like Airbnb and WeWork have dynamically changed the physical landscapes of our cities, with whole neighborhoods “redeveloped” in part thanks to the influx of transient renters. The most immediately impacted by these changes have been working class Americans, who for the past eight years have felt the effects of new technologies in the form of higher rents in their neighborhoods and tenuous, unstable working conditions in the gig economy.
The tech industry’s continued squeeze on labor and urban development is sure to come to a head — as it appears to be in many cities — but still pales in comparison to the scale of disruption looming for the manufacturing sector. In 2012, Amazon acquired Kiva, a robotics firm in Massachusetts that was responsible for a device quickly being adopted by the nation’s largest retailers. Kiva cut down on the cost of warehouse labor by providing robots that operate at perfect efficiency (taking the human out of “human error”). After Amazon bought the company, much of Kiva’s technology was patented by the retail giant, giving Amazon an unshakable advantage in a robotics arms race whose ultimate loser will be the scores of workers it replaces.
Kiva’s little robots scurry around Amazon’s thousands of distribution centers, working alongside humans whose jobs are now performing the tasks the robots can’t: placing items on shelves, identifying boxes etc. The nearly 30,000 Kiva bots estimated to operate across Amazon’s warehouses glide around the meticulously organized stacks, identifying the location of various products with sensors on the bot’s frame. The Kiva robot then positions itself underneath the stack of items and,with a high-powered carrying rig, transfers the whole shelf of goods to the other side of the building. Dave Clark, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide operations and customer service, told Bloomberg that the bots reduced expenses by about 20 percent, saving roughly $22 million in expenses per warehouse.
The boom in this type of automation is just beginning. Despite Amazon’s early dominance in the field, a number of start ups in Boston have developed advancements on warehouse automation technology, in part, because Amazon’s patents forced their hands. Now, major retailers like Wal-Mart and Macy’s are getting in line to test out refined versions of the Kiva system that, potentially, will squeeze more work from the hands of their human counterparts. Some of the pilot programs for these automated warehouses are already under way. None of this is to say a mass layoff of workers is going to happen tomorrow, just that the slow, irreversible dissolution of those jobs has already begun, and there is no reason to think the trend will slow down. Amazon, sprinting to whatever this finish line looks like, is hard at work on warehouse drones that will be able to fly around and retrieve items from shelves, removing at least one essential duty of the warehouse’s human staff.
There is nothing more than time standing in the way of thousands of jobs disappearing. Permanently. What’s more, the jobs left for humans who hope to survive by working with their hands grow more mindless and degrading by the day. President Obama, speaking to reporters from Businessweek, said that “ because of automation, because of globalization, we’re going to have to examine the social compact, the same way we did early in the 19th century and then again during and after the Great Depression.” The next president will undoubtedly face a serious challenge on this issue. Next year, for example, Chevrolet and ride-sharing app Lyft will be testing out autonomous vehicles on public roads, a development that could upend the trucking and taxi industries for good. This early iteration of the program requires a human driver be in the passenger seat of the vehicle, presumably to be present as their existence becomes obsolete. In Businessweek, the president offers higher wages in the service sector as one of the most viable solutions to these advances. He says the service sector — what he sees as a safe haven against automation on account of its human touch — is going to have to pick up a lot of the slack. Increasingly, however, service jobs are being automated, too.
The idea of a universal basic income, a guarantee of a fixed sum of money to every citizen no matter their employment status, is by many accounts seen as an ideal solution. Workers whose jobs become, at no fault of their own, unattainable, will be offered a basic level of dignity from which they could even possibly attain the education needed for a higher-paid, essentially human(for now!) job. Managing such a dream policy with a political system as institutionally divisive as America’s will naturally require an enormous, drawn-out, great compromise, one the U.S. hasn’t seen, as Obama pointed out, since The New Deal. The current presidential race does not inspire any confidence in such an optimistic outcome.
Hillary Clinton, the presumptive democratic nominee, offers some hope that a form of progressive policy will address the shifting nature of our “social compact” in light of advances in technology. The former Secretary of State has been outspoken on fairness in the sharing economy and in an economic speech given last year, she said she’d crack down on companies exploiting employment loopholes similar to Uber’s classification of drivers as independent contractors. Still, one wonders what Clinton will do in the likely event that Uber replaces its drivers with autonomous vehicles. When asked in a live chat on Facebook whether or not she supported a negative income tax — a similarly distributive form of basic income — Clinton responded nonsensically, saying:
“I certainly don’t have all the answers. But we have to resolve these questions while embracing the promise and potential of these new technologies and without stifling innovation or limiting the ability of working moms and veterans and young people to get ahead.”
That Donald Trump has so fortuitously captivated the very population for whom these policies would be designed by morphing, ever so subtly, the racial anxieties lingering from the aftermath of Obama’s election — that is, the notion that white Americans have lost something — is made only more distressing by his deafening silence on automation. Trump’s solution to the working class’ very real concern that the specifics of their life is under a deep existential threat, is to create a boogyman out of people who don’t look like them, or worse, to “political correctness.”
Not only has Trump provided no perspective on the issue of what to do for workers as their jobs increasingly automate (although, in fairness, it doesn’t seem like he’s been asked), his campaign’s sheer absurdity has made opening the floor for discourse on one of the most pressing (and solvable!) domestic issues in modern history, impossible.
Meanwhile, the Really Big Challenge ahead just keeps rolling right towards us. Last month Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed that the company had been working on artificial intelligence for the past four years and had more than 1,000 staffers devoted exclusively to the project. “It’s probably hard to overstate how big of an impact it’s going to have on society over next 20 years,” he said.
