Robotic Labor

Today is Labor Day, a day to honor the workers who drive our economy. It's funny how everyone wants to work -- people say creating jobs should be the new president's top priority -- and yet nearly everyone dreams of the day they can retire, too.

On the surface, it seems like we could all work a lot less and still get by OK. 150 years ago, 90% of the population was engaged in agriculture, but now with the help of machines we're able to grow all our food using just 2% of our population, plus maybe figure another 1% to make the machines and 2% to provide the gasoline. That means that the remaining 85% could just take a permanent holiday and we could in theory still have at least the living standard of 150 years ago. I must say I'd be pretty sad to give up the internet, cars, and modern medicine though, among other things.

But when I see high unemployment figures, I figure on a macro level it's a good thing, because that means we've gotten so efficient that we simply don't need any more manual labor to run our society and live our lives, thereby freeing us from the bonds of labors of survival so we can go paint an artwork and engage in labors of love instead. But somehow people have construed high unemployment figures into a bad thing, as though tedious labor in and of itself were somehow desirable.

Anyway, I assume it's just a matter of time before we're able to build robots that can do all our work for us, like slaves minus the human tragedy, freeing us to live lives of leisure previously known only to the aristocracy. This seems like a good thing to me, but I wonder if everyone else would see it that way too? I can imagine people saying "hey, these robots are taking our jobs!" to which I would reply, "but why do you want these jobs? If the labor can be done for free, why don't you take the day off and enjoy yourself?"

Some might worry that robots could screw up our economy. Until now our purchasing power has been limited by how much money we have, and money is essentially a measure of how much work we've done (or tricked someone else into doing on our behalf). So to get more money, you have to do some work and contribute more to the economy. But now imagine that suddenly we have robots doing all our work for us... the robots will work as hard as we tell them to. People will own dozens of them, they'll be the best investment you can make. We'll make as much money as we like. This could potentially devalue money itself, like the case of the town full of millionaires (if everyone suddenly became millionaires in a town, money would rapidly lose its value as people outbid each other for finite physical resources... an extreme version of what's happened in New York with real estate amidst Wall Street riches).

I think this would not happen though, because the case of robot laborers is different: the robots are actually doing labor, in other words, they're earning their paychecks by creating more goods and services, so they create their own value and thus pay their own way. Another way to imagine it is if they don't earn money at a job but we instead instruct them to directly build the products we desire: tell one robot to build me a house, another to build a car, another to advise me on my taxes (hey wait a minute, the tax advise robot is already here, it's called TurboTax!). This would all be fine, more than fine in fact, it would be downright great.

Computers are already making this vision come true, and it's been excellent so far. It's great that humans don't have to spend time and energy calling various airlines to string together flights to match their travel itinerary, now we have expedia and travelocity. We no longer need bank tellers for most basic transactions, or switchboard operators to make a phone call or find a phone number. We don't need to call our broker to make a stock trade and we don't need a mathematician to figure out the square root of 31 divided by 3. It's 1.856, and I just figured that out as fast as I could type in the numbers into Windows Calc. (This is why I love programming; I love making the world more efficient, solving a problem just once so it never has to be considered again.)

And of course before computers, there were the fabulously labor-saving invention/discoveries of electricity and internal combustion engines. (And before that, windmills and animal husbandry.)

Some day, I presume robots could even fight our wars for us, too, so no more soldiers lost. But I suspect people would find this unsatisfying, and so would just find new ways to kill humans anyway, by targeting civilians, for example. Work unfortunately isn't the only thing people hate but yet still inexplicably crave.

I think kicking back and being happy isn't something we're really bred to do. Happy people don't achieve much, because where's their motivation? And so probably we are all descended from unhappy people, the worriers, the restless and dissatisfied people who wanted something better, and went out and made it. So here we are, a nation of restless people with hardly anything left to build, looking for something to do, literally looking for someone to create work for us. Well anyway, happiness is a relatively novel concept, evolutionarily speaking, so I don't suppose that there's any intrinsic reason why we should seek it above any other emotion. If everyone walked around happy all day, maybe it would become like the town full of millionaires, where joy itself would lose its meaning. Or maybe we'd simply go extinct in our contented laziness, and be replaced by those who go on working, fighting, and grabbing...

Indeed, I've heard it suggested that contrary to popular depictions, the Neanderthals did not die for want of intelligence -- despite a shorter stature their cranial capacity was actually about 10% larger than that of modern humans -- but they merely lacked homo sapiens' bloodlust, and were killed off like dodo birds. In other words, maybe they were just too content to live and let live; they lacked homo sapiens' relentless drive, the same drive that makes us actually want to work even when there's no work to be done.

But today is a day when everyone has agreed that they don't want to work, so whatever your thoughts on this post, Happy Labor Day!