by Ben Bova
The CEO said nothing; he merely sat hunched in his oversized chair, watery eyes blinking slowly.
“On the other hand,” the bodyguard went on, “our tax situation should be vastly improved by all these losses. If we continue with the electronic book project, we won’t have to worry about the IRS for the next three years, at least.”
Lipton wanted to protest, to shout to them that the electronic book was more than a tax dodge. But his voice was frozen in his throat.
“What’s your decision, sir?” the bodyguard asked.
The CEO lifted one frail hand from his desktop and slowly clenched it into a fist. “Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!”
The Result
Mitsui Minimata held his breath. Never in his happiest dreams had he entertained the idea that he would someday meet the Emperor face to face, in the Imperial Palace. Yet here he was, kneeling on a silken carpet, close enough to the Divine Presence to touch him.
Arrayed around Mitsui, also kneeling with eyes respectfully lowered, were the head of Kanagawa Industries, the vice president for innovation, and the chief engineer of the Numazu plant. All were dressed in ceremonial kimonos more gorgeous than Mitsui would have thought it was possible for human hands to create.
The Emperor was flanked by serving robots, of course. It was fitting that the Divine personage not be touched by human hands. Besides, his decision to have robots serve him presented the Japanese people with an example of how these new devices should be accepted into every part of life.
With trembling hands Mitsui placed the first production unit of the electronic book in the metal fingers of the robot that stood between him and the Emperor. The robot pivoted, making hardly more noise than the heel of a boot would on a polished floor, and extended its arm to the Emperor.
The Emperor peered through his glasses at the little electronic package, then picked it up. He had been instructed, of course, on how to use the book. But for an instant Mitsui was frightened that somehow the instructions had not been sufficient, and the Emperor would be embarrassed by being unable to make the book work. Suicide would be the only way out, in that case.
After what seemed like several years of examining the book, the Emperor touched the green pressure pad at its base. Mitsui knew what would come up on the screen: a listing of all the books and papers that the Emperor himself had written in the field of marine biology.
The Divine face broke into a pleased smile. The smile broadened as the Emperor pecked away at the book’s controls, bringing one after another of his own writings to the book’s page-sized screen. He laughed with delight, and Mitsui realized that mortal life offered no higher reward than this.
Mark Moskowitz paced angrily back and forth across his one-room apartment as he argued with the image of his attorney on the phone screen.
“But they’re screwing me out of my own invention!” he yelled.
The attorney, a sad-eyed man with an expression of utter world-weariness, replied, “Mark, when you accepted their money you sold them the rights to the invention.”
“But they’re lousing it up! Three years now and they still haven’t produced a working model that weighs less than ten pounds!”
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” said the attorney. “It’s their ball.”
“But it’s my idea! My invention!”
The attorney shrugged.
“You know what I think?” Mark growled, pacing back to the phone and bending toward the screen until his nose almost touched it. “I think Hubris Books doesn’t want to make the project succeed! I think they’re screwing around with it just to give the whole idea a bad name and make certain that no other publisher will touch it, by the time they’re finished.”
“That’s silly,” said the attorney. “Why would they...”
“Silly?” Mark snapped. “How about last year, when they tried to make the picture screen feel like paper? How about that scheme they came up with to have a hundred separate screens that you could turn like the pages of a book? Silly? They’re crazy!”
They argued fruitlessly for nearly half an hour, and finally Mark punched the phone’s OFF button in a fury of frustration and despair. He sat in glowering, smoldering anger in the one-room apartment as the afternoon sun slowly faded into the shadows of dusk.
Only then did he remember why he had placed the call to his attorney. The package from Tokyo. From Mitsui. When it had arrived, Mark had gone straight to the phone to see what progress his suit against Hubris Books was making. The answer, of course, had been: zero.
With the dejected air of a defeated soldier, Mark trudged to the table by his hotplate where he had left the package. Terribly afraid that he knew what was inside the heavy wrappings, he nonetheless opened the package as delicately, as tenderly, as if it contained newborn kittens.
It contained a newborn, all right. An electronic book, just as Mark had feared. No message, no card. Nothing but the book itself.
Mark held it in the palm of his left hand. It weighed a little more than a pound, he judged. Three pads were set below the screen, marked with Arabic numerals and Japanese characters. He touched the green one, which was marked “1.”
A still picture of Mitsui appeared on the screen, grinning—no, beaming—at him. The amber pressure pad, marked “2,” began to blink. Mark touched it.
A neatly typed letter appeared on the screen:
Dear Friend Mark:
Please accept this small token of my deep friendship for you. In a few days your news media will be filled with stories about Kanagawa Industries’ revolutionary new electronic book. I will tell every reporter I speak to that the idea is just as much yours as mine, which is nothing more than the truth.
As you may know, trade agreements between your government and mine will make it impossible for Japan to sell electronic books in the U.S.A. However, it should be permissible for us to form an American subsidiary of Kanagawa in the United States. Would you consider accepting the position of chief scientist, or a post of similar rank, with this new company? In that way, you can help to produce electronic books for the American market.
Please phone me at your earliest convenience...
Mark read no further. He ran to the phone. He did not even bother to check what time it was in Tokyo. As it happened, he interrupted Mitsui’s lunch, but the two exroommates had a happy, laughing talk together, and Mark agreed to become vice president for innovation of the planned Kanagawa-USA subsidiary.
Moral
Victor Hugo was right when he said that no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. But if you’re narrow-minded enough, both the time and the idea can pass you by.
Robot Welfare
The robots are coming, the robots are coming! Really. In truth. This generation of human beings may be the last to be engaged in boring, mechanical jobs. Or any jobs at all. A robot society is being built before our eyes, and the changes it brings will be just as huge, just as painful, as the changes wrought by what is now called the First Industrial Revolution .
The robots are coming, and they are looking for your job. No matter if you are a steelworker or a law clerk, an assembly line technician or a receptionist, there is a robot learning to do your work.
If and when you are replaced by a robot, how will you earn your living? That is the most profound question facing the American economy today. While politicians on the national, state, and local levels all wave the banner of “high technology” as a cure for economic recession, virtually none of them have even thought about the fact that high technology and high employment for human workers may be totally incompatible.
I stood in a large, airy room that looked like a health spa for robots. Mechanical arms were swinging, flexing, grasping, bending. More than a dozen robots were exercising in the robot lab of the General Motors Research Laboratories, in Warren, Michigan, a few miles outside Detroit. Some of the robots have been doing their calisthenics for more than two years.
“We’r
e testing their durability,” says Dr. Robert A. Frosch, director of the Research Laboratories. A former head of NASA, Frosch seems quite at home with the robots. And the robots keep on working tirelessly, without anyone supervising them: swing, flex, grasp, bend. Eight hours a day. Or sixteen, if necessary. Or maybe even twenty-four.
Testing their durability. I got the idea that the robots were practicing, among themselves, to take over most of the jobs in today’s workplaces.
While I was watching those robots patiently, smoothly, ceaselessly repeating their assigned tasks, some 750,000 telephone workers were walking the picket lines across the nation, on strike against AT&T. Yet the telephone system worked virtually without a wobble, because it is so highly automated that it could do without those three-quarters of a million human workers, at least for a few weeks. “Telescab,” the strikers called the computerized networks that kept the phones working with a minimum of human help.
In California, that same week, the Wells Fargo Bank and the Bank of America announced plans to close more than sixty branch offices throughout the state, replacing them with automated teller machines. “We’re changing the way we distribute banking services,” said a Wells Fargo executive.
Nor were telephone workers and bank clerks the only people being hit by automation that week. The Wall Street Journal carried an article on how computers are transforming the practice of law. “Computers write letters, contracts, wills and briefs,” said the Journal. “Computers bill clients and keep track of evidence and court calendars.... Computer systems provide pushbutton legal research, finding in minutes cases that once took hours or days to locate. Computers can check the testimony of one witness against another and help in tax, estate, and pension planning.”
Computers, robots, and automated systems are very much in the job market today, competing against human workers every day—and winning.
There are nearly 2500 robots at work in General Motors factories today. GM plans to bring their robotic workforce up to 14,000 by 1990. Most of these robots work at the toughest, dirtiest, noisiest jobs: assembly, machining, welding, painting. The robots are deaf, blind, and not very sensitive. But they work without complaint and they never ask for a raise.
There are more than ten million unemployed people in the United States. The automobile industry laid off roughly half a million in the first two years of the 1980s. Economists agree that most of these workers will never be rehired; not at their old jobs, at least. Frosch and others at GM insist that the planned increase in robots will not cause more layoffs of human workers. But the clear fact is that the job market for people at GM will not expand, while the job market for robots will.
“Robots don’t cause unemployment,” says Dr. James S. Albus, chief of the Industrial Systems Division of the National Bureau of Standards, just outside Washington, D.C.
“At least,” he amends, “robots don’t cause unemployment in the countries that build the robots. Robots built in Japan have caused unemployment in the United States, but employment has risen in Japan because of robotics.”
Albus’ point is that robots allow a manufacturer to produce goods of higher quality and lower cost than human workers. Therefore robots increase productivity, make the company more profitable, and lead to the creation of more markets, more jobs, more opportunities for human workers. But in the nation that imports robot-produced goods, domestic markets shrink, overseas markets disappear, and jobs grow scarcer.
Is the United States becoming an underdeveloped nation, robotically speaking? Will America enter the twenty-first century as a second-rate power, exporting grain and importing high technology goods built by foreign robots? Or must American industry replace most of its human workforce with robots, to stay abreast of foreign competition, and thereby cause massive unemployment?
In the whole world, there are fewer than 34,000 robots working in industry today. Japan leads the world with some 20,000 robots. The United States has about 6000 on the job, and Western Europe has roughly 8000. These numbers are growing by about thirty-five percent per year, which means that there could be 100,000 robots in the U.S. by 1990, and a million robots on the job in America by the year 2000. That would represent about two percent of the total labor force. By the year 2020, though, if the rate of increase keeps steady, there will be as many robots in the workforce as people.
Many decades ago, science fiction writers depicted a future world in which robots did most of the work in society, freeing human beings from the drudgery of labor. That kind of world is slowly becoming reality. But the question that the writers never faced is the problem that confronts us today: When a robot takes over my job, how do I earn an income?
The simplest answer is to prevent robots from entering the workforce. In Britain, until very recently, the powerful labor unions resisted automation of any kind on the grounds that it took away jobs from human workers. Just across the English Channel, the French government encouraged automation and moved actively to bring high technology to French industries. The result: the British economy stagnated because outdated equipment and rising labor costs priced British goods out of the international markets; unemployment soared in Britain during the latter half of the 1970s. Meanwhile French employment remained relatively stable as the French accepted computers and automation into the workforce—until the Mitterand government came into power and caused layoffs through unrelated fiscal policies.
To industry executives, robots and automation are the necessary wave of the future. Automated machinery and robots allow a company to produce its products not only more cheaply, but with higher quality. The machines already do better work than humans, mainly because they do not get tired or bored with their work. And the machines are getting better all the time. Today’s robots are already giving way to improved models that can see, make decisions, and grasp as sensitively as—well, at least as sensitively as a gorilla.
“It’s a survival thing,” says Dick Beecher, of the GM robot lab. “Are we going to abdicate our position in the automobile industry to Japan?”
Men like Frosch and Albus, who are at the forefront of the robotic movement, hesitate to use the word revolution in connection with robots.
“This is an evolutionary movement,” Frosch insists, “not a revolution.”
He sees robots gradually changing the very nature of manufacturing work. And while GM does not plan to lay off workers as more and more robots are introduced to their factories, it is clear that the more robots there are in GM plants, the fewer new workers GM will have to hire.
This kind of shift in work patterns has happened before. Nearly two hundred years ago, in what is now called the First Industrial Revolution, hand crafts and small village shops were replaced within a single generation by steam-driven factories. At first in Britain, and then through most of Europe and the new nation of the United States of America, men and women alike left the farms and villages to find employment in the “dark, satanic” mills that belched out smoke, soot, filth—and jobs.
Cities grew enormously, because despite the inhuman working conditions in those factories, there was money to be made. The “slave wages” that most workers earned were still better than the backbreaking life on the farm, for which they had received no wages at all. And the owners of those mills became fabulously wealthy: they were the bourgeoisie that Marx and Engels saw as the enemy of the working man.
But communism and socialism were latter-day reactions to the rampant spread of industrialization. The first counterattack came in England, in the form of rioting mobs which came to be called Luddites, after their mythic founder, Ned Ludd. The Luddites were English craftsmen who tried to stop the young Industrial Revolution by destroying the textile factories that were taking away their traditional incomes. Starting in 1811, the Luddites rioted, burned, and even killed at least one factory owner after he had ordered his guards to shoot at a rioting mob. The British government broke the back of the Luddite movement after five years of turmoil by hanging dozens of the leaders an
d transporting others to prison colonies such as Australia.
Although the Luddite terror was broken, the underlying causes of social injustice and poverty slowly, painfully evolved into legal political action. The labor movement grew out of the ashes. So did Marxism.
Frosch compares the growing pains of the First Industrial Revolution with those of today’s introduction of robots into the workplace. Although he would not endorse a term as dramatic as “the Second Industrial Revolution,” he does see parallels.
“The major changes in U.S. agriculture,” he muses, “are—in some sense—a previous experience, a situation in which there was a shift in productivity, driven by technology. A lot of new technology was introduced [to farming], there was a tremendous productivity increase which was accompanied by a change in the size of farms, and a lot of people shifted out of agriculture and went to manufacturing in urban areas. To some extent, they went into the automobile industry.”
Those farmers who migrated to city factories did not have retraining programs to help them. They learned their new skills on the job, or they got fired. The situation is very different today, for their great-grandchildren. Workers who face competition from robots and automated systems demand either job protection or retraining for jobs that are not threatened by robotics.
“There’s no question that robotics is changing the number of people that industry uses,” Frosch agrees. “In particular, it’s changing the number of unskilled workers. Just as in the pick-and-shovel situation, where you now have a difficult time selling your back and shoulders, it’s going to be very difficult to sell unskilled manipulative capabilities or very simple logical and ‘software,’ or thinking skills.”
Assembly-line workers, he points out, have been regarded as relatively unskilled, although they tend to gain skills on the job. Still, it is the repetitive manipulative kinds of assembly-line jobs that are being taken over the fastest by tireless, uncomplaining robots.
