Automation has been the target of criticism from unrelated sources in the past few weeks. Some of it is related to its eliminating jobs, which I believe is actually a good thing.
On June 14, IEEE Spectrum published a post on Senator Tom Coburn’s criticisms of NSF-funded robotics research projects. That same day, President Obama linked automation to economic problems:
There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.
Last Friday President Obama, perhaps in an effort to reach out to those of us working in industrial automation, visited the Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center and announced an initiative to fund new robotics projects.
What Is Behind This Interest in Automation?
Senator Coburn’s admits he is not knowledgeable about the robotics programs he criticized. He selected programs that “just caught [his] eye.” I suspect his motivation is a search for ways to cut spending without affecting entitlements and military, which account for most spending. In his report he says knows scientific research is important; he is only criticizing what he believes is wasteful spending.
President Obama may have used the word “structural” to contrast with “cyclical” issues. The economic cycle can be influenced by monetary and fiscal policy (i.e. interest rates, money supply, and rate of government borrowing). The idea is that the economic cycle has some would-be consumers, works, and means of production all sitting needlessly idle. “Structural” issues go beyond the economic cycle and relate to things like needing new skills or new kinds factories. This is consistent with last week’s initiative supporting robotics research.
Engineers Resisting Technology
Some engineers are surprisingly skeptical of encouraging robotics research. The most common complaint is the impact of automation on jobs. As an engineer, I consider it always a good thing to be able to produce more with less effort. That means if artificial intelligence reaches the point where it can understand specs, read datasheets, and make tradeoffs, I will be mostly out of a job and need to learn something useful in the post-AI-EDA world. I do not want to people to forgo the new EDA software as charity to me.
Technology’s Creative Destruction
The problem of new technologies not benefitting everyone is important and ancient. In Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which covers why certain human societies increased their production and came to dominate hunter-gatherer societies, Diamond points out that even though moving from a hunter-gather society to an agricultural society increased productivity, the change at first made the average person’s life worse in some ways. We should not accept as inevitable that new technologies won’t benefit everyone at first, but we should not be surprised either if there are some painful changes associated with a new technology.
Some of my colleagues have rightly pointed out that in a modern context this means we create something that replaces someone’s job, e.g. Obama’s airport kiosk. People who would have done that job, now must learn to design, test, build, repair, or sell that machine. As the technology matures, low-cost competitors appear, the technology becomes commoditized, and many of those people are again out of a job. As one thing becomes commoditized, however, there is a reciprocal process of decommoditization occurring some place else as if there were some law of conservation of charge for commoditization. (See Clayton Christensen’s amazing book, The Innovator’s Solution, for more on this.) All those people and businesses affected by this commoditization must again anticipate what activities will be profitable after the change and move in that direction.
This process of creative destruction leads to more good and services with less work. It also makes life much more complicated than it was in the past when the type of work people did was the same as what their grandparents had done and what they expected their grandkids to do.
If we deploy new technologies mindful of their costs and do our best to mitigate the pain associated with change, it is better to have the technology than stability. I don’t know whether robotics will shake up the world and get more done with less work, in other words “eliminate many jobs”, but I certainly hope so.
