re: #240 Expand Your Ground

Robotics werw supposed to mean more prosperity and less work for us.

But it turned out to mean more prosperity and more unemployed…I don’t thnk that is quite the point, but that is now our system is currently set up.

Robotics is doing to manufacturing what the combine and the tractor did to agriculture. Manufacturing has become something we can do with very little labor input.

“Jobs” has two meanings. One is work that needs to be done, work that yields more in results than its costs. The other is as a social mechanism for distributing resources to people.

Whenever there’s a technological change that dislocates the marriage of these two, there’s friction. Enclosure in England. The advent of mechanical looms in England throwing women with spinning wheels out of work in India. Machines that displaced workers in France, and prompted them to throw “sabots” into the machinery, breaking it. (Saboteurs—-then a new word, a coinage.) John Henry, displaced by a steam hammer. And on and on.

The overall effect of these revolutions in productivity has been to increase human lifespan to over double its pre-industrial value, with more and better goods for almost all. Our numbers have also soared.

Sometimes, the changes have just rolled over the victims. (Enclosure, for example.) Sometimes, there’s been mitigating institutions set up, or the victims have been explicitly bought off. The demise of manufacturing as a major source of employment will be one more chapter in this saga. There are all sorts of mitigation efforts but nothing ever puts the victims back to where they were. The winners are the consumers who find that their income reaches further than it used to when buying “stuff”. Automobiles are safer, they get better mileage, and they last longer. Fridges are bigger yet use less electricity. Functional basic clothing is so cheap that even the third-world poor mostly wear solid attire, not rags.

Going back to the way things were means going back to dangerous cars with bad mileage, fridges that use more kwh than we can generate, and beggars in rags. That’s practically and morally unacceptable.

Rolling right over the victims and telling them it’s all for the best in the end is no good either. Taken to the extreme, one gets massacres of miners. Taken in “moderation”, one gets political backlash aimed at slowing the introduction of these ultimately benign advances in technology. Economists who have studied the history of technology change argue that we should just buy out the victims. That way, we secure the overall benefits in a way that greatly cushions the blow to the losers, without much diluting the benefits to the more numerous winners.