Nearly a year ago, Donald Trump walked onstage at an aluminum factory in Monessen, Pennsylvania, and began a speech coalescing around his favorite topic from the stump—making America great again. Citing his experience in the real-estate business, Trump said he would personally guarantee that he could ensure the rehabilitation of the rural town and its woebegone manufacturing industry. He discarded a number of potential obstacles—secular trends such as globalization, existing trade agreements, and the increasing preponderance of robotics—and outlined his hope for the resurrection of the American steel business. All he would have to do, so it seemed, was prevent large companies from sending jobs overseas and force them to buy American-made goods.
Trump’s campaign was filled with lies and falsehoods, but this one may be the most damaging of all. Not only does it misunderstand the forces at play in the global economy, but it does not even begin to comprehend the massive changes ahead. And it is those changes that are likely to render Trump not merely a fool but also a political eunuch.
A few years ago, as I was walking through the robotics lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observing prototypes for fold-up driverless cars and digitized prosthetics, among other things one only expects to see in Christopher Nolan movies, I was arrested by a sign that sat upon one student’s desk. “Be nice to the robots,” the placard read, “for they will be in charge one day.” The sign was presumably meant as a joke, but that prophetic mantra stuck with me for years. It seemed so eerily accurate. What I didn’t realize, however, was how quickly that day would arrive.
During the past few years, we have been inundated by research reports from universities and media outlets presaging the dawn of the Robot Revolution. The futurists and roboticists whom I’ve spoken with often predict that the first wave of vanishing jobs will be the “repetitive” ones: meat packers, who recurrently slice open a cow’s carcass; or stockroom attendants, who carry boxes from one shelf to another in a warehouse; and supermarket cashiers who slide your bananas and boxes of cereal across a scanner. All of them will see their functions replaced by an algorithm. Amazon is already working on a prototype in which you enter a grocery store, fill your bag with food, and then simply walk out. Sensors and cameras know exactly what you’ve purchased and will automatically charge your Amazon account. Something along these lines will happen with clothing stores, gas stations, even most restaurants.
But these sorts of advances, while undeniably futuristic, only represent a small fraction of what their underlying technologies can accomplish. The number of jobs that will be affected, and rendered irrelevant, by robots, automation and artificial intelligence is going to be astounding and terrifying. And the day of reckoning is not decades away; it’s only a matter of years from now. Forecasts have noted that entire industries will be overtaken by vehicles that are controlled by little robotic brains and thousands of sensors. Truck drivers will likely be out of work; taxi and Uber drivers will see a decline in the need for their services, too. And this transformation isn’t going to happen simply in a vacuum. We will see cars start to drive themselves down the street while their passengers nap or watch a movie. Rather than fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco, you might get into your car at bedtime and program a destination so that you could wake up in the peninsula. Many U.P.S., FedEx, and U.S. postal service workers will be replaced by drones. (I’ve seen prototypes for huge gas-powered drones that can carry one-ton packages 40,000 feet in the air at speeds two or three times that of an airplane.) Construction workers will one day be replaced by 3-D printers that can literally print a home in a day by squeezing out cement and other materials like icing atop a cake.
One of the big promises of driverless cars has been that the technology will help erase the preponderance of automobile accidents. There are currently some 33,000 people in the United States who died each year in car crashes, and 94 percent of accidents, indeed, are caused by human error. Yet even this hopeful, life-saving efficiency will negatively affect doctors, ambulance drivers, people who work in body shops, glass-repair shops, and other related industries. Then there are auto auctioneers, the telemarketers who answer the phone at call centers when you need to call A.A.A., or get a new lease quote. Loan underwriters, credit managers, actuaries, rental-car agents, people who work in driving schools.
The list goes on and on. Traffic courts will completely vanish. (You can’t speed if you’re not driving.) And think about all the easy money that would be siphoned away from the car industry and government. Americans rack up $6.2 billion in speeding tickets a year. Gone. Billions of dollars in parking tickets. Gone. A truck with no one behind the wheel doesn’t need to stop to get a burger in the middle of the night or use the restroom. All of this makes the people who work at rest stops and motorway hotels useless.
Here’s a scary thought: many of the states with the most truckers also have the most gun owners. So it should be interesting to see if they go quietly into the night when they are out of work. And if you’re a Republican, here’s an even scarier thought: these are many of the states that voted for Donald Trump last November under the misguided hope that his attacks on migrant workers and companies who off-shored jobs could somehow erase the most inconvenient truth of all. Globalization was once the greatest threat to the middle class. Now it’s automation. And the wreckage is only about to begin.
While it might seem unlikely to us dumb humans, driving is actually a rather easy task for a machine to learn. Roads are a specific width and length, motorways generally operate at a certain type of speed, city streets at another, and networked cars can learn together very quickly how to avoid obstacles.
Automation and artificial intelligence are going to be able to do far more complex jobs. Eventually, doctors, most specifically surgeons, could be replaced by nano-robots that are (or will be) so tiny that they could be dropped into your blood supply and perform surgery on you, or fight cancer or a virus, while you watch TV at home. (Presuming we still watch TV in the future, that is.) There will be less of a need for military and soldiers on the battlefield (drones have already facilitated this transition), and infantrymen will be replaced by terrifying-looking robots that can run faster than a cheetah, or swarms of fighter drones, before being rendered useless themselves as the world presumably transitions to cyber or biological warfare, which could lead to a lot more casualties than traditional wars.
And then there’s people like me. If you think a robot or algorithm can learn to be a lawyer or surgeon, or drive a truck across America but can’t learn to draw or paint, write a song or edit a story, you’re failing to grasp just how pervasive this Robot Revolution is going to be. Art directors and copywriters will be replaced by an algorithm that can A/B test 500 versions of an advertisement to see which is best for a specific audience. Eventually, as in Minority Report, each ad will be tailored to each person who views it. Business books, or how-to guides, could be written by machine-learning algorithms. Even thrillers and novels. Films and TV shows will have computer-generated actors and actresses that don’t complain about the size of their trailer. Films will be edited by algorithms. Robots, automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and a slew of other technologies will learn to write pop songs and greatest hits. And while there will be standouts (think La La Land, among last year’s manufactured hits) most consumers won’t know the difference between those made by humans and those made by machines.
People who are building this future predict that America will have to implement a Universal Basic Income, or UBI, in which Americans who lose their jobs to automation are paid a wage by the government. But let’s think about that for a moment. Can you imagine the Republicans getting on board with such an idea? Paul Ryan and his band of cohorts behind Trumpcare can’t even fake enough morality to help the poor get health insurance. Do you really think they are going to pay millions of out-of-work truck drivers to stay at home and do nothing? Good luck with that one.
So what will happen when we all lose our jobs to automation? Some theorize that, in the same way that the Industrial Revolution made way for a new class of creative jobs that didn’t exist before, the Robot Revolution will free up the proletariat from the labors of driving cars or trading stocks, and an entirely new industry will be born from all our free time. Maybe they’re right. But there is major difference between these two consequential revolutions. The Industrial Revolution took place during the course of nearly a century, from the mid 18th century to the mid 19th. The speed with which we will become servile to robots is going to happen with such rapidity we won’t know what’s happened until an estimated 75 percent of Americans are out of a job by the end of the century.
Trump’s campaign was filled with lies and falsehoods, but this one may be the most damaging of all. Not only does it misunderstand the forces at play in the global economy, but it does not even begin to comprehend the massive changes ahead. And it is those changes that are likely to render Trump not merely a fool but also a political eunuch.
A few years ago, as I was walking through the robotics lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observing prototypes for fold-up driverless cars and digitized prosthetics, among other things one only expects to see in Christopher Nolan movies, I was arrested by a sign that sat upon one student’s desk. “Be nice to the robots,” the placard read, “for they will be in charge one day.” The sign was presumably meant as a joke, but that prophetic mantra stuck with me for years. It seemed so eerily accurate. What I didn’t realize, however, was how quickly that day would arrive.During the past few years, we have been inundated by research reports from universities and media outlets presaging the dawn of the Robot Revolution. The futurists and roboticists whom I’ve spoken with often predict that the first wave of vanishing jobs will be the “repetitive” ones: meat packers, who recurrently slice open a cow’s carcass; or stockroom attendants, who carry boxes from one shelf to another in a warehouse; and supermarket cashiers who slide your bananas and boxes of cereal across a scanner. All of them will see their functions replaced by an algorithm. Amazon is already working on a prototype in which you enter a grocery store, fill your bag with food, and then simply walk out. Sensors and cameras know exactly what you’ve purchased and will automatically charge your Amazon account. Something along these lines will happen with clothing stores, gas stations, even most restaurants.
But these sorts of advances, while undeniably futuristic, only represent a small fraction of what their underlying technologies can accomplish. The number of jobs that will be affected, and rendered irrelevant, by robots, automation and artificial intelligence is going to be astounding and terrifying. And the day of reckoning is not decades away; it’s only a matter of years from now. Forecasts have noted that entire industries will be overtaken by vehicles that are controlled by little robotic brains and thousands of sensors. Truck drivers will likely be out of work; taxi and Uber drivers will see a decline in the need for their services, too. And this transformation isn’t going to happen simply in a vacuum. We will see cars start to drive themselves down the street while their passengers nap or watch a movie. Rather than fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco, you might get into your car at bedtime and program a destination so that you could wake up in the peninsula. Many U.P.S., FedEx, and U.S. postal service workers will be replaced by drones. (I’ve seen prototypes for huge gas-powered drones that can carry one-ton packages 40,000 feet in the air at speeds two or three times that of an airplane.) Construction workers will one day be replaced by 3-D printers that can literally print a home in a day by squeezing out cement and other materials like icing atop a cake.
One of the big promises of driverless cars has been that the technology will help erase the preponderance of automobile accidents. There are currently some 33,000 people in the United States who died each year in car crashes, and 94 percent of accidents, indeed, are caused by human error. Yet even this hopeful, life-saving efficiency will negatively affect doctors, ambulance drivers, people who work in body shops, glass-repair shops, and other related industries. Then there are auto auctioneers, the telemarketers who answer the phone at call centers when you need to call A.A.A., or get a new lease quote. Loan underwriters, credit managers, actuaries, rental-car agents, people who work in driving schools.
The list goes on and on. Traffic courts will completely vanish. (You can’t speed if you’re not driving.) And think about all the easy money that would be siphoned away from the car industry and government. Americans rack up $6.2 billion in speeding tickets a year. Gone. Billions of dollars in parking tickets. Gone. A truck with no one behind the wheel doesn’t need to stop to get a burger in the middle of the night or use the restroom. All of this makes the people who work at rest stops and motorway hotels useless.
Here’s a scary thought: many of the states with the most truckers also have the most gun owners. So it should be interesting to see if they go quietly into the night when they are out of work. And if you’re a Republican, here’s an even scarier thought: these are many of the states that voted for Donald Trump last November under the misguided hope that his attacks on migrant workers and companies who off-shored jobs could somehow erase the most inconvenient truth of all. Globalization was once the greatest threat to the middle class. Now it’s automation. And the wreckage is only about to begin.
While it might seem unlikely to us dumb humans, driving is actually a rather easy task for a machine to learn. Roads are a specific width and length, motorways generally operate at a certain type of speed, city streets at another, and networked cars can learn together very quickly how to avoid obstacles.
Automation and artificial intelligence are going to be able to do far more complex jobs. Eventually, doctors, most specifically surgeons, could be replaced by nano-robots that are (or will be) so tiny that they could be dropped into your blood supply and perform surgery on you, or fight cancer or a virus, while you watch TV at home. (Presuming we still watch TV in the future, that is.) There will be less of a need for military and soldiers on the battlefield (drones have already facilitated this transition), and infantrymen will be replaced by terrifying-looking robots that can run faster than a cheetah, or swarms of fighter drones, before being rendered useless themselves as the world presumably transitions to cyber or biological warfare, which could lead to a lot more casualties than traditional wars.
And then there’s people like me. If you think a robot or algorithm can learn to be a lawyer or surgeon, or drive a truck across America but can’t learn to draw or paint, write a song or edit a story, you’re failing to grasp just how pervasive this Robot Revolution is going to be. Art directors and copywriters will be replaced by an algorithm that can A/B test 500 versions of an advertisement to see which is best for a specific audience. Eventually, as in Minority Report, each ad will be tailored to each person who views it. Business books, or how-to guides, could be written by machine-learning algorithms. Even thrillers and novels. Films and TV shows will have computer-generated actors and actresses that don’t complain about the size of their trailer. Films will be edited by algorithms. Robots, automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and a slew of other technologies will learn to write pop songs and greatest hits. And while there will be standouts (think La La Land, among last year’s manufactured hits) most consumers won’t know the difference between those made by humans and those made by machines.
People who are building this future predict that America will have to implement a Universal Basic Income, or UBI, in which Americans who lose their jobs to automation are paid a wage by the government. But let’s think about that for a moment. Can you imagine the Republicans getting on board with such an idea? Paul Ryan and his band of cohorts behind Trumpcare can’t even fake enough morality to help the poor get health insurance. Do you really think they are going to pay millions of out-of-work truck drivers to stay at home and do nothing? Good luck with that one.
So what will happen when we all lose our jobs to automation? Some theorize that, in the same way that the Industrial Revolution made way for a new class of creative jobs that didn’t exist before, the Robot Revolution will free up the proletariat from the labors of driving cars or trading stocks, and an entirely new industry will be born from all our free time. Maybe they’re right. But there is major difference between these two consequential revolutions. The Industrial Revolution took place during the course of nearly a century, from the mid 18th century to the mid 19th. The speed with which we will become servile to robots is going to happen with such rapidity we won’t know what’s happened until an estimated 75 percent of Americans are out of a job by the end of the century.
by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair | Read more:
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