It’s easy enough to identify the death of the Abrahamic faiths, and the corresponding cultural changes, as an engine of much of the world’s discord. Less discussed, though just as consequential, is the digitization of industry — Industry 4.0.
Put simply, more of the world’s work, and record-keeping, has been automated. Several years ago I visited a 3-story factory just a few miles from my home which had no more than a half-dozen people on duty, though it was operating 24-hours a day at top production.
Any rote task can be automated — and will be. It may be cheaper today to move work to Mexico, but that will inevitably spur wage increases there; when wages increase enough, it will be more cost-effective to build a factory that needs just a very few people. Inevitably, necessarily, unavoidably, manufacturing employment is going to continue declining, no matter Donald Trump’s bellicosity.
At this exact moment, there are platforms all over the world pumping oil with nobody on board; they are visited every couple weeks by a technician who does some minor, routine maintenance. What is more, there is now an initiative to build oil drilling rigs which don’t need roughnecks. Crops are harvested by combines which rely on data from satellites to decide which row is ready to be picked; if Farmer Green Jeans is on board, it’s only because he’d rather sit in the cab than sit on the couch with his wife and watch Dr. Phil. Laborers are being replaced by robots and, globally, tens of millions of jobs are going to be lost over the next few decades.
Even professional services such as engineering are being automated, with computer programs now performing hundreds of calculations in a twinkling. What is more, thanks to coding the heuristics formed by experience, engineering judgment can be duplicated. No kidding: I have read of the data from subsurface soil investigations being analyzed, and design recommendations prepared, wholly by computer.
Robots have performed surgery under the direction of a doctor hundreds of miles away. Today, routine cardiac procedures are performed by doctors who watch a computer monitor far more closely than the patient in front of them.
All labor, even professional labor, is being automated; the next generation of factories and office equipment and shop tools is being designed to eliminate people. This is not science fiction; it’s happening today.
And why not? A computer or robot will work continuously without complaint, without trips to the restroom, without coffee, and for years with no further capital investment. Repetitive motions don’t cause health problems for robots. Robots don’t come in hungover, and they produce the identical product again and again and again …
The millions of jobs lost to automation is just the beginning; there are tens, hundreds, of millions more to go.
We are headed, right now, toward a world in which the only people who work are boutique craftsmen, entertainers, and the people who build, program, and maintain the machines.
We need to spend more time thinking through the social and governmental implications of that, and less time worrying about how to punish Carrier et. al. The simple fact is that a solid majority of people are ill-suited for the technical work of the future. What is going to become of them? Are they going to be allowed to starve to death? They’ll kill the technicians and destroy the machines before that happens. But there isn’t going to be any useful work for them, either. What is the world going to be like when only 50-, or 75-, or 100-million people are needed to do the necessary work? How will goods be apportioned?
As I’ve said in the past, we are living in the midst of a truly epochal change in philosophy and technology, and the world is going to look a lot different when we get to the other side of it.