The Astral Mirror

by Ben Bova

  In fact, the Robotics Institution of America defines a robot in almost exactly those assembly-line terms. In RIA’s definition, a robot is: “A reprogrammable multi-functional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through variable programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks.”

  But assembly-line workers are not the only ones to hear the faint humming of automated machinery coming closer to them. Micro-computers, the miniature electronic “brains” of robots, are already threatening the white-collar worker, as well. Dr. Christopher Evans pointed out in his book, The Micro Millennium: “The vulnerability of the professions [to computerization] is tied up with their special strength—the fact that they act as exclusive repositories and disseminators of specialized knowledge.” Specialized knowledge is exactly what computers are best at: a lifetime accumulation of law books or medical references can be packed into a few floppy disks and put at the fingertips of anyone who knows how to operate a personal computer.

  Evans shows that the micro-computers which are invading offices and homes can be programmed to handle income tax forms, school assignments, even simple medical questions. Doctor, lawyer, teacher, and other white-collar professionals are already finding their jobs—and power— being eroded by micro-computers.

  In the automobile industry itself, white-collar workers have felt the sharp edge of automation’s ax cut just as deeply into their ranks as those of their blue-collar brethren. In the first two years of the 1980s the auto companies laid off some 55,000 white-collar workers, about twenty-seven percent of their non-production employees.

  Dr. Morgan B. Coker, chairman of the Department of Business Administration and Economics at Francis Marion College, in South Carolina, has pointed out that microcomputers are allowing companies to trim the fat from their middle-management ranks. “More than attrition was taking place,” he wrote of the white-collar layoffs in many diverse industries. “Businesses were stripping away layers of management and firing office workers to get ‘lean and mean.’ The micro-computer is a major force in the new style of American management...”

  Frosch says that GM factory workers have accepted robots quite well. A worker taken off the assembly line to supervise a robot that does his old job has actually moved a step higher in the world. “They give the robots names, like ‘Big Bertha,’” he told me.

  But what about the workers who have been laid off, from the automobile industry and elsewhere, and will not be rehired because automation and robotics have eliminated their jobs? Union Pacific Corporation, for example, laid off 6000 of its 44,000 workers over the past few years. James H. Evans, chairman of the railroad company, said in May 1983, “Will they come back? The answer is probably not.” He pointed out that Union Pacific is carrying forty percent more freight tonnage than the line did twenty years ago, with half as many employees. “If we had the same number of employees we had then, we would have priced ourselves out of the market. How have we done it? Automation.”

  For the workers who have lost their jobs to the machines, government and industry offers a variety of retraining programs. But some workers resist retraining, and try to hold out on unemployment and other welfare benefits until they are called back to resume their original jobs. Yet it is clear that most of these jobs will never be held by human beings again.

  Meanwhile, whole new industries are opening up, especially in the electronics field. National statistics show that even while unemployment soared to more than ten percent of the workforce in the early 1980s, the worst it has been since the Depression of the 1930s, total employment in the United States continued to grow. And in 1982, for the first time in America’s history, jobs in the service sector of the economy outnumbered jobs in manufacturing. But the jobs offered there are for skilled technicians and engineers, not laid-off assembly-line workers or middle-management bureaucrats.

  Frosch sees a basic change in the character of work itself, a change that may be dangerous. “We will go through a period in which relatively unskilled labor gets squeezed out. The question is, what happens to such workers?”

  In the First Industrial Revolution, workers squeezed out of the hand crafts and farms went to the cities and were absorbed into the new manufacturing industries. Or starved.

  “But where do you go when unskilled workers are replaced by skilled machines?” Frosch believes that unskilled manufacturing workers are not going to be absorbed into the growing market for services, for the same reason that robots are not going to perform services such as barbering and hand crafts. It takes human skills to accomplish such tasks, skills that the robots do not yet have—and neither do the unskilled workers who are being replaced by robots.

  Some economists suggest that the new industries created by high technology will create as many jobs as those lost to automation and robotics. But not for the same people.

  “What I don’t see,” Frosch says, “is what happens to the people who are now non-trained, and are not easily trainable.” There may well be, he fears, “a part of the population that is not very educated... not skilled, and who don’t seem to be trainable.” In other words, a permanent underclass of unemployables.

  Part of the problem is that many workers have tacitly assumed that their job “belongs” to them for life; that even though they may be temporarily laid off during economic downturns, they will be rehired when the economy improves, and make up for the lost time by demanding higher wages and stronger job-protection rules.

  Perhaps labor and management can work out suitable attrition policies, in which the company promises not to fire any members of its existing workforce because of automation, in return for labor’s understanding that new workers will not be recruited, and when a worker quits or retires, he or she will not be replaced by a new hire. One problem with such a policy, however, is that the money spent in maintaining the human workforce is money that cannot be invested in new machinery. Investing the money in robots could well be more productive for the company than maintaining its human workforce.

  The problem of future employment is mainly a problem of education. “There has always been a group of people who, for one reason or another, did not get educated,” Frosch says. “We have never completely succeeded in finding out how to deal with the whole population in terms of education.” Up until now, there have always been productive jobs for uneducated, unskilled workers. But that day is going fast.

  “Do we end up with a de facto class structure?” he worries, seeing a nation with a permanently unemployed and unemployable caste. “That’s a bad business. It’s morally bad, it’s socially bad... I don’t think it’s enough to simply say that it’s a social justice problem and we have to see that somehow everybody gets fed.”

  Very few thinkers have even considered how to handle the human and social impact of the robot invasion. The engineers are busy designing better machines, the entrepreneurs are carving out new markets for robots, the business managers are trading off the costs of buying robots against the productivity gains they stand to produce, labor leaders are trying to protect their workers from robot-induced unemployment.

  The trend of this Second Industrial Revolution, which is what the oncoming wave of robotics really amounts to, is quite clear. No matter how the experts may try to ignore the facts, or argue against them, the robots are getting smarter, cheaper, and more skilled. They will be taking over more and more jobs as the years go on. Inevitably, most of the jobs that can be done twice the same way—be they in a factory or an office—will be done by robots and/or computers.

  Where does that leave the workers? Not everyone put out of work by automation can be absorbed into new jobs. A forty-year-old assembly-line worker is not going to blossom into an electronics technician. A young secretary is not going to turn into a computer programmer after six weeks of retraining. Besides, those jobs will also be threatened by robotics and automation, eventually. The machines are learning how to reproduce themselves.

  Congressman Don Fuqu
a, chairman of the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee, is one of the few politicians who is doing something about the robot revolution, rather than merely making speeches about “high tech.”

  Fuqua has drafted legislation that calls for a doublepronged approach to the problems—and opportunities—of robotics. To combat robot-induced unemployment, Fuqua wants the National Science Foundation to begin training programs for workers. He foresees a program that starts at the $5 million level and increases to $10 million per year through 1990.

  A human job might be replaced by a robot, Fuqua maintains, but “somebody’s got to operate the robot, and keep it working. And somebody’s got to build that robot.” What is needed, then, is to help workers to elevate their levels of skills so that they can take part in the robot revolution, rather than be sidelined by it.

  “There’s a whole new shift in employment skills, to a higher level. There are a lot of different jobs that will be created by the use of robots,” he says.

  Fuqua admits that some workers will not be retrainable, for reasons varying from age to ambition. “They may not desire to have their skills upgraded.”

  The legislation he is proposing does not deal merely with the unemployment problems created by robotics. The other side of Fuqua’s approach sets up a robot leasing corporation, funded initially with federal money, which will help to provide the capital for businessmen to obtain robots and bring them into industry.

  “The robot leasing corporation is based somewhat on the existing Farm Credit Administration and Comsat Corporation,” Fuqua says. “It will be a quasi-government corporation. Its role will be to stimulate the demand for robots, and therefore the production of robots.”

  Fuqua sees federal funding of $20 million per year, to provide low-interest loans to businesses, as “seed” money for the leasing corporation. Private investment will be encouraged, and will provide the bulk of the corporation’s funds. Eventually the corporation will pay back the government’s original loans with interest. Thus robots may begin to put money into the national treasury.

  The robot leasing corporation, according to Fuqua, can “make it attractive for people to install certain types of robots, depending on the needs of their companies. It can be a source of capital to finance the lease [or purchase] of robots.”

  Fuqua’s legislation, which is also backed by Cong. Albert Gore, Jr. of Tennessee and George Brown of California, among others, can help to provide investment capital for the transition to robotics while also cushioning the unemployment this transition is bound to cause.

  Fuqua sees robots gradually entering the workplace, and being most valuable in jobs that are too dangerous or difficult for humans to attempt: cleaning up radioactive nuclear powerplants, for example, or fighting fires.

  “I see robots moving in everywhere,” says Albus, who has spent the past ten years designing robots for the National Bureau of Standards. “Some places sooner than others, but practically everywhere sooner or later.”

  He points out, “Robots create wealth. That makes the society that builds them and uses them able to maintain a much higher standard of living. This creates demand for expanded numbers of products and makes it possible to afford to hire the people to supply those products.”

  This leads to a contradiction. On the one hand, thinkers such as Albus see robots creating wealth and a demand for more goods and thus more jobs. On the other hand, they also foresee new robots eventually taking over those jobs.

  Albus argues, however, that “the main restriction to employment is not the amount of work to be done in the world. The amount of work that needs to be done is virtually infinite. The question is, can you afford to hire people to do the work?”

  Considering all the tasks that can be done in a society, from repairing roads and picking up trash to bringing expert medical care to the poor and exploring outer space, Albus says, “The real fallacy is thinking that there’s a fixed amount of work to be done, and if robots do some of it there won’t be enough work to go around for humans. God, the world is filled with things that need to be done— just walk around your neighborhood and you can make a list of three hundred things that need to be done and can occupy a whole army of people to do them.”

  But these things are not done, not only because society cannot afford to have them done, but because the people who make up society learn that they can get along without doing them.

  “Basically, I think it’s because we can’t afford them,” Albus insists. “Getting along without means scaling back your living standards.”

  Taking a wider view, Albus says, “The world is filled with poverty, hunger, poor housing, poor education... there’s plenty of things that need to be done. The question is really, can we afford to do all these things?” Only to a very limited extent today are these problems being dealt with, mainly because poor nations and poor people cannot afford to solve them. Albus believes that if robots and their high productivity begin to create vast new sources of wealth for their owners, some of this wealth can be used to attack poverty and hunger around the world.

  Albus sees this wealth being generated by an evergrowing number of robot workers. (Actually, the term “robot workers” is a redundancy. Robot is from a Czech word that means worker. The term was coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his 1920 play, R.U.R.) Today’s workforce of some 6000 robots is growing at a rate of about thirty-five percent per year. By the end of this decade, Albus and other robot experts see at least 100,000 robots in the United States, growing to a million by the turn of the century.

  What does this mean to the twenty-or thirty-year-old human worker of today? It means unemployment, somewhere in the future, whether you like it or not.

  “My guess,” says Albus, “is that they might get to retire a little earlier than they otherwise would. I don’t think anybody would be terribly upset about retiring at fifty-five instead of sixty-five.”

  Living on a fixed retirement income for ten years longer than today’s pensioners? Sitting at home with nothing to do while the robots busily clank around your former workplace? That can be bad enough, but what about the people who have already been pushed into unemployment— not retirement—by robots and automation? Labor experts talk about the “structurally unemployed,” the people who will most likely never be rehired because they haven’t the skills to compete in the labor market and will not or cannot be retrained. They see a hard core of six and a half percent of the total human workforce as structurally (read, permanently) unemployed today. That’s more than six million men and women. And the number is expected to grow, not shrink.

  How much wealth must the robots generate merely to absorb the unemployment they will be helping to cause? How can we dream of a robot-produced Utopia where no one is hungry or poor, when the earliest impact of robotics seems to mean wide-scale unemployment for humans?

  But there is unemployment and unemployment, as a philosopher would say. If you drink in the corner saloon at ten in the morning you’re considered a bum; but if you drink at ten a.m. in the country club, you’re a golfer. The difference between the two is wealth. If the robots are going to generate so much wealth, how can society be arranged so that the workers dis-employed by robots get their fair share of the money?

  Albus has been pondering this matter for as long as he has been designing robots, and has written books on the subject, including People’s Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution. “The primary mechanism for transferring wealth,” he says without hesitation, “is ownership.”

  One of the ways in which employees can begin to own the robots which displace them is through Employee Stock Ownership Plans: ESOPs. Economist Louis O. Kelso, author (with Mortimer J. Adler) of The Capitalist Manifesto and Finishing the Unfinished Capitalist Revolution, hit upon the idea in the 1950s of having companies issue shares of their own stock to their employees as a kind of fringe benefit, an addition to or replacement for bonuses or retirement plans. Many companies have since started
ESOPs, and some firms have even become totally owned by their employees. Albus believes that an ESOP-type plan could permit employees to attain ownership of a highly-automated firm, and thus gain a share of the profits generated by the robots.

  Looking further into the future, Albus believes that the best way to handle the economic impact of the Second Industrial Revolution is for the government to create a National Mutual Fund.

  Every citizen would be a shareholder in the NMF, receiving a share at age eighteen, by virtue of being an American citizen. The NMF would not obtain its investment funds directly from its shareholders, however. Instead, it would borrow investment capital from the Federal Reserve Bank. The amount borrowed would be huge, billions of dollars per year. Congress would have to decide on a ceiling, just as Congress now places a ceiling on the national debt.

  The NMF would then invest its capital in high technology, robotics and automation, concentrating its efforts on modernizing industries that have become technologically backward.

  “Specifically,” Albus says, “the NMF would attempt to promote the development of robots and automated factories and would provide supplemental worker’s compensation and retraining incentives where these would be necessary or useful.”

  The profits coming back to the NMF from the increased productivity of the roboticized industries would be paid to the investors: the citizens of the U.S.A.

  Albus emphasizes that, “NMF payments would not be welfare or charity based on need. They would be dividends paid to the shareholders of a profit-making institution.” As in any corporation, each share of stock would receive an equal share of the dividends.

  In other words, the National Mutual Fund is a way of making a capitalist out of every American citizen, while at the same time providing funds for the robot revolution and distributing the profits equably.

  Critics point out that the NMF’s borrowings from the Federal Reserve could cause enormous inflationary pressures on the economy. Albus replies that the government could control such pressures by giving a part of the NMF’s profits to its shareholders in the form of savings bonds, rather than cash. This would be a form of government-mandated forced savings which would remove spendable money from the marketplace, slow down the inflationary spiral, and even provide more capital for investment in the NMF.