The Rise of the Robots

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What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of therobots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, thisquestion crops up whenever unemployment rises.
In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo consideredthe possibility that machines would replace labor; Karl Marx followed him.Around the same time, the Luddites smashed thetextile machinery that they saw as taking their jobs.
Then the fear of machines died away.New jobs – at higher wages, in easier conditions, and for more people – weresoon created and readily found. But that does not mean that the initial fearwas wrong. On the contrary, it must be right in the very long run: sooner orlater, we will run out of jobs.
For some countries, this long-run prospect might beuncomfortably close. So, what are people to do if machines can do all (or mostof) their work?
Recently, automation in manufacturing has expanded even toareas where labor has been relatively cheap. In 2011, Chinese companies spent¥8 billion ($1.3 billion) on industrial robots. Foxconn, which build iPads forApple, hopes to have their first fully automated plant in operation sometime inthe next 5-10 years.
Now the substitution of capital for labor is moving beyondmanufacturing. The most mundane example is oneyou will see in every supermarket: checkout staff replaced by a single employeemonitoring a bank of self-service machines. (Though perhaps this is notautomation proper – the supermarket has just shifted some of the work ofshopping onto the customer.)
For those who dread thethreat that automation poses to low-skilled labor, a ready answer is to trainpeople for better jobs. But technological progress is now eating up the betterjobs, too. A wide range of jobs that we now think of as skilled, secure, and irreducibly human may be the next casualties of technological change.
As a recent article in the Financial Times points out, in twoareas notoriously immune to productivity increases, education and health care,technology is already reducing the demand for skilled labor. Translation, dataanalysis, legal research – a whole range of high-skilled jobs may wither away. So, what will the new generation ofworkers be trained for?
Optimists airily assert that“many new types of job will be created.” They ask us to think of the leaddrivers of multi-car road trains (once our electric cars join up “convoy-style”), big data analysts, or robot mechanics.That does not sound like too many new jobs to me.
Imagine a handful of technicians replacing a fleet of taxidrivers and truckers, a small cadre of human mechanics maintaining a full robot workforce, ora single data analyst and his software replacing a bank of quantitativeresearchers. What produces value in such an economy will no longer be wagelabor.
We can see hints of that future now. Twitter, thesocial-media giant, is an employment minnow. It is valued at $9 billion, but employs just 400 peopleworldwide – about as many as a medium-size carpet factory in Kidderminster.
It is not true that automation has caused the rise ofunemployment since 2008. What is noticeable, though, is that structuralunemployment – the unemployment that remains even after economies haverecovered – has been on an upward trend over the last 25 years. We are findingit increasingly difficult to keep unemployment down.
Indeed, the days when we in Britain thought it was normalto have an unemployment rate of 2% have long since passed. It was considered agreat achievement of the last government that it brought unemployment down to 5% at theheight of an unsustainable boom. And it only succeeded in doing so bysubsidizing a lot of unnecessary jobs and useless training schemes.
No doubt some of the claims made for robots replacing humanlabor will prove as far-fetched now as they havein the past. But it is hard to resist the conclusion that “technological unemployment,” as John Maynard Keynescalled it, will continue to rise, as more and more people become redundant.
The optimist may reply that the pessimist’s imagination istoo weak to envisagethe full range of wonderful new job possibilities that automation is openingup. But perhaps the optimist’s imagination is too weak to imagine a differenttrajectory – toward a world in which people enjoy the fruits of automation asleisure rather than as additional income.
During the Industrial Revolution, working hours increasedby 20% as factories replaced feasting. With ourpost-machine standard of living, we can afford to shed some of the Puritan guilt that has, for centuries, kept our nosesto the grindstone.
Today we find a great deal of work-sharing in poorcountries. It is the accepted means of making a limited amount of availablework go around. Economists call it “disguised unemployment.”
If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemploymentis a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape frompoverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of “spreading the work” that stillhas to be done by human labor.
If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, whymake half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number forhalf the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the averageworking week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to ten, with eachdiminishing block of labor time counting as a full time job? This would bepossible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich andpowerful, but were distributed fairly instead.
Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is allthat the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of moreleisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need arevolution in social thinking.

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关键词：Robots robot bots rise The employment machines replace easier higher

What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of therobots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, thisquestion crops up whenever unemployment rises.

Recently, automation in manufacturing has expanded even toareas where labor has been relatively cheap. In 2011, Chinese companies spent¥8 billion ($1.3 billion) on industrial robots. Foxconn, which build iPads forApple, hopes to have their first fully automated plant in operation sometime inthe next 5-10 years.Now the substitution of capital for labor is moving beyondmanufacturing. The most mundane example is oneyou will see in every supermarket: checkout staff replaced by a single employeemonitoring a bank of self-service machines. (Though perhaps this is notautomation proper – the supermarket has just shifted some of the work ofshopping onto the customer.)

For those who dread thethreat that automation poses to low-skilled labor, a ready answer is to trainpeople for better jobs. But technological progress is now eating up the betterjobs, too.
As a recent article in the Financial Timespoints out, in two areas notoriously immune to productivity increases,education and health care, technology is already reducing the demand forskilled labor.
It is not true that automation has caused the rise ofunemployment since 2008. What is noticeable, though, is that structuralunemployment – the unemployment that remains even after economies haverecovered – has been on an upward trend over the last 25 years. We are findingit increasingly difficult to keep unemployment down.
No doubt some of the claims made for robots replacing humanlabor will prove as far-fetched now as they havein the past. But it is hard to resist the conclusion that “technological unemployment,” as John Maynard Keynescalled it, will continue to rise, as more and more people become redundant.
The optimist may reply that the pessimist’simagination is too weak to envisagethe full range of wonderful new job possibilities that automation is openingup. But perhaps the optimist’s imagination is too weak to imagine a differenttrajectory – toward a world in which people enjoy the fruits of automation asleisure rather than as additional income.
Today we find a great deal of work-sharing in poorcountries. It is the accepted means of making a limited amount of availablework go around. Economists call it “disguised unemployment.”If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemploymentis a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape frompoverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of “spreading the work” that stillhas to be done by human labor.If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, whymake half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number forhalf the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the averageworking week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to ten, with eachdiminishing block of labor time counting as a full time job? This would bepossible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich andpowerful, but were distributed fairly instead.