Memories of the 28th Century

While writing about migration, both legal and illegal, I started thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) with respect to that. People have been writing about AI taking jobs from people for decades. The word robot itself was introduced in K. Čapek's play R.U.R. "Rossum's Universal Robots" (1920), and that play is about robots taking away jobs from people. In 1950 Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut was published, and that novel was about automatic machinery taking jobs from people. I just remembered that the Luddites were protesting textile machinery hundreds of years ago. Although there have been advances in automation; the machines still need people to watch over them. The people are still essential for the operations. The automation of the machinery has made it so that one person can be more productive, and the products are often of higher quality and more uniform, and sometimes the products couldn't have been made with hand labor in any quantities (think of microprocessors as one example), but there are still people there to watch the quality of the machine's output, make sure there is raw material, and to to repairs or resetting as that becomes necessary. There are relatively more machines per person, but the people aren't going away. Instead, the jobs have gone away.

In many cases manufacturing has been sent to countries with lower labor costs, and that process probably will continue until labor costs have evened out around the world, and it will become cheaper to invest in technology than in moving production to another country. Even in extremely automates operations, people are constantly watching machine condition and actions. I recall going through a pipe factory where the work was done by a single machine into which metal strip was fed. The machine bent the strip around a mandrel and welded the seam. A grinder was set to smooth the joint when the pipe was welded, and a cut-off saw was attached, so the pipe was cut to suitable lengths. There was a video camera trained on the place where the weld was made, so that the operation was monitored constantly. There were people around to make sure the there was adequate raw material to cart away the finished pipe in addition to monitoring the operation of the machine. As automatic as the machine was, it didn't eliminate the humans; although, in theory, it might have been able to operate without humans.

As yet, computers are not capable of handling the variable functions of a job as well as or as cost effectively as humans. While that pipe welding machine is cost effective, it isn't cost effective to have free moving AI's gathering the finished goods and bringing in fresh rolls of raw metal. And overseeing the whole operation is certainly beyond the capability of a machine. It is better to leave the machine on during lunch and coffee breaks and hope that it doesn't make a mistake or hit a flaw in the metal strip.

The ability of businesses to move operation around the world have led to decreased innovation in machinery. I just looked at images of recent textile machinery and saw things that were barely changed from what was being produced a hundred fifty years ago, except that now they have covers over the moving parts and look more finished, and some have programmable controls; although I could not determine details from the photos. In the 1950's and 60's textile machinery was moved from New England to the South and later to South America. Companies with narrow specialties didn't move, and those were the ones that needed new machinery. The guards and controls had to be upgraded to meet OSHA regulations and similar regulations in other developed countries, but nothing cost-wise or quality-wise encouraged the manufacturers to add robotic of AI controls.

And then the machinery went to China, where people were cheaper than robotic controls, and then Vietnam and Indonesia became the manufacturing locations, and people were still cheaper. The only place left is Africa, but I haven't seen anything on manufacturing going there, so we may have seen the last move before the controls will start taking people out of the mix. It is a process that has been going on for a few hundred years, and it doesn't look like it will end soon, unless the pandemic does greatly reduce population and forces businesses to use computers instead of people.

It is said that there are AI's that pass the Turing test; i.e., can't be distinguished from humans in conversation. I have never met such a machine, and I have mixed feelings about meeting one. If consciousness is simply a matter of a certain density of connections in a brain, then AI's might become conscious soon, but no one is claiming that, yet.

The world of With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson and the rest of his Humanoid series is as conceivable now as it was in the 1950's, but it also seems to be as distant. Speculation is fun and interesting, but there's only one way to know what will happen; wait and see.

I have mixed feelings about replacing people with machines. For some people repetitive, mindless tasks are all they can handle, but most people are capable of abstract thoughts, planning, etc., so the repetitive tasks are inappropriate to them. When there was little technology, and everything was done by hand it was different, but mass production takes creativity out of the mix. But the question is what will the people do? Humans haven’t evolved to become machine tenders, and there may be something surprising coming up, and I’m not thinking of Kurzweil’s singularity.