The Robots Are Here
Not only are they taking our jobs—they’re harbingers of a new libertarian age.
By TYLER COWEN, Politico Magazine
Isaac Asimov, the astonishingly prolific science fiction writer, died in 1992, but he foresaw much about American politics today. One of his most profound works is the neglected short story “Franchise,” written in 1955, in the days when computers were bulky, room-sized machines powered by vacuum tubes and operated by a high priesthood of punch card-wielding technicians. For a work of fiction, it is stunningly prescient.
In Asimov’s tale, set in November 2008, democratic elections have become nearly obsolete. A mysterious supercomputer said to be “half a mile long and three stories high,” named Multivac, absorbs most of the current information about economic and political conditions and estimates which candidate is going to win. The machine, however, can’t quite do the job on its own, as there are some ineffable social influences it cannot measure and evaluate. So Multivac picks out one “representative” person from the electorate to ask about the country’s mood (sample query: “What do you think of the price of eggs?”). The answers, when combined with the initial computer diagnosis, suffice to settle the election. No one actually needs to vote.
Asimov was on to something: American political campaigns have indeed become extraordinarily sophisticated data-mining operations driven by smart computers, harvesting and sifting through vast virtual warehouses of demographic information and consumer preferences to manipulate and shape the electorate.
[…]
Even the robots so familiar from vintage science fiction are now really making their mark. Worldwide annual shipments of industrial robots have more than doubled in the past decade, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, announced in 2011 that it would increase the use of robots in its factories one hundredfold, bringing its total to 1 million robots by 2014. South Korea is experimenting with robotic prison wardens that patrol and report inmates who do something wrong; Japanese restaurants are deploying fast-food robots to make and serve sushi. Meanwhile, lower-level tasks are now being automated by software programs, changing newsrooms, law firms, hospitals and countless other workplaces. Automation and other productivity improvements are expected to have eliminated 2.2 million business-services jobs in the United States and Europe from 2006 to 2016, at a rate of about 200,000 jobs annually, according to the Hackett Group, a Miami-based consultancy. [my emphasis]
As one joke making the rounds has it, “A modern textile mill employs only a man and a dog—the man to feed the dog, and the dog to keep the man away from the machines.” That is the world in which we now live.
Full article The Robots Are Here – POLITICO Magazine.
