Robot Takeover: Not as Bad as All That?

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, many jobs have become increasingly simple and mechanical in nature due to the detailed division of labor. This applies, as we have discussed in class, not only to assembly-line style factory jobs, but also to customer service and clerical jobs as well as jobs once considered inherently creative such as computer programming. Many of these jobs, broken down into chunks of labor digestible by the principles of automation, now require almost no human work at all and are performed exclusively by robots or computer code. Even seemingly managerial tasks such as product inspection and supervision of employees (robot or human) are now done by robots in many cases, and of course M-C-M' means that no one should be paid to do what a robot will do just as well for free. Even our military, it seems, is on the verge of depending on combat robots like BigDog, pictured below.

Though I do not subscribe to the Kurzwelian notion of an impending "singularity", I do ask myself what direction the ever-increasing technological capabilities of modern humanity will be taking the world in terms of labor and culture. What will happen when most of a society's undesirable tasks can be done by robots instead of "wage slaves"? I think we are already seeing the beginnings of the answer to this question, which certainly has a positive and a negative side for humanity.

The negative side has been pretty well covered by popular science fiction. Perhaps robots, human-controlled or not, will make a bid to take over the world (as if they hadn't already). Perhaps we will all become utterly absorbed in virtual reality simulations. Perhaps humanity will be reduced to a bunch of lazy, fat good-for-nothings.

On the other hand, I think it's very possible that humanity, along with its conceptions about time management and labor, will simply adjust to the new environment in a positive way. Educational standards will continue to rise, as they have in current years, meaning that people will stay in school longer, marry later, and may have less children. In this way, improved food production and health care will be kept from causing a "population explosion". Since almost all menial labor jobs will be performed by robots, real people will be freed up for either more interesting or simply more lazy tasks. Call me optimistic, but I think that many people will transcend the modern "couch potato" phase of humanity – a world with almost no work of any sort – and become a society of post-modern artisans and artists. In a techno-utopia, people will be free as never before to pursue artistic lifestyles – not only because their needs are taken care of by robots, but because technology will offer an unprecedented quantity and quality of creative outlets such as VR sculpting or (just possibly) sky surfing.

Is this stuff really going to happen? Maybe not, but it's worth thinking about why technological progress isn't all bad for labor and culture both.