work and humanity

Here lies the greatest obstacle to human progress — the longstanding connection between work and income.

Nowhere is the above more clear than in two recent pieces of news: Google’s announcement that Boston Dynamics is up for sale, and Johnson & Johnson’s announcement that the Sedasys machine would be discontinued.

Atlas Shrugged Off by Google

You probably already saw it, as over ten million others did within days of it being posted to YouTube, but the demonstration video of the new version of Atlas from the robotics team at Boston Dynamics was a stunning display of engineering that shocked the world. Similar to the victory of the AI AlphaGo over world champion human Go player Lee Sedol just weeks later, it dumbfounded people with the realization of how quickly technology is advancing.

People naturally saw with their own eyes how close they are to having robots fully capable of doing physical tasks previously thought to be decades down the road, and the result was a discussion sprinkled with more than a bit of human panic based in entirely legitimate fears of income insecurity. This ended up being a discussion Google had no interest in, and so Boston Dynamics is now up for sale. To be fair, Google already wanted to sell BD, but leaked emails do show the concerns of negative PR as a direct result of advanced robotics:

In yet more emails wrongly published to wider Google employees, Courtney Hohne, a spokeswoman for Google X, wrote: “There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs ... We’re not going to comment on this video because there’s really not a lot we can add, and we don’t want to answer most of the questions it triggers.”

Google wants to advance technology but at the same time, it doesn’t want to answer the questions those advancements will raise. This appears to be a clear example of a major obstacle for human progress. It’s the same likely reason companies like McDonald’s haven’t dived in with both feet to greatly automate their operations and vastly reduce their labor forces. The technology exists, but they aren’t doing it. Why?

Perhaps it’s because as long as people need jobs as their sole source of income, companies have the potential of stepping onto a public relations landmine by automating their jobs out of existence, or being seen as responsible for others doing so. Eliminating jobs also means not only cutting employees, but demand itself.

Putting humans out of work should be a public relations win, not a loss...

Putting humans out of work should be a public relations win, not a loss, and so mankind needs to make sure no one left without a job, for any amount of time, is ever unable to meet their most basic needs. Everyone needs a non-negotiable guarantee of income security, so that the elimination of jobs breeds not fear, but excitement. The loss of a job should be seen as an opportunity for new real choices. And so some amount of basic income should be guaranteed to everyone — universally — as a starting point upon which all can earn additional income.

However, negative PR is just one obstacle along the road to full automation. Another obstacle is something originally devised to make sure employed humans had some amount of bargaining power, so as to not be walked all over by those who employed them, and that’s the forces of organized labor. In an unfortunate turn of events, that which once helped drive prosperity is beginning to hold it back. Organized labor is organizing to perpetuate the employment that tech labor is working to eliminate.