Automation Comes to China

The key question isn’t “How much will be automated?” It’s how we’ll conceive of whatever can’t be automated at a given time. Even if there are new demands for people to perform new tasks in support of what we perceive as automation, we might apply antihuman values that define the new roles as not being “genuine work.” Maybe people will be expected to “share” instead. So the right question is “How many jobs might be lost to automation if we think about automation the wrong way?”

One of the strange, tragic aspects of our technological moment is that the most celebrated information gadgets, like our phones and tablets, are made by hand in gigantic factories, mostly in southern China, and largely by people who work insanely hard in worrisome environments. Looking at the latest advances in robotics and automated manufacturing, it’s hard not to wonder when the labors of these hordes of new potential Luddites might become suddenly obsolete.

In this case, even once the technology becomes available, I suspect politics will slow it down a little. It’s hard to imagine China deciding to throw much of its own population into unemployment. It is still a centrally planned society to a significant degree. It’s hard, even, to imagine one of China’s neighbors doing it. Would an aging Japan automate its factories to undercut China? Seems like a significant risk.

But somebody somewhere would find the motivation. Maybe a low-population but capital-rich Persian Gulf nation worried about the post-oil future would fund gigantic automated factories to undercut China in the production of consumer electronics. It might even happen in the United States, which has ever-fewer manufacturing jobs to protect anyway.

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (2013-05-07)

• automation
• futurism
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