not to fire any members of its existing workforce because of automation, in return for labor’s understanding that new workers will not be recruited, and when a worker quits or retires, he or she will not be replaced by a new hire. One problem with such a policy, however, is that the money spent in maintaining the human workforce is money that cannot be invested in new machinery. Investing the money in robots could well be more productive for the company than maintaining its human workforce.
The problem of future employment is mainly a problem of education. “There has always been a group of people who, for one reason or another, did not get educated,” Frosch says. “We have never completely succeeded in finding out how to deal with the whole population in terms of education.” Up until now, there have always been productive jobs for uneducated, unskilled workers. But that day is going fast.
“Do we end up with a de facto class structure?” he worries, seeing a nation with a permanently unemployed and unemployable caste. “That’s a bad business. It’s morally bad, it’s socially bad... I don’t think it’s enough to simply say that it’s a social justice problem and we have to see that somehow everybody gets fed.”
Very few thinkers have even considered how to handle the human and social impact of the robot invasion. The engineers are busy designing better machines, the entrepreneurs are carving out new markets for robots, the business managers are trading off the costs of buying robots against the productivity gains they stand to produce, labor leaders are trying to protect their workers from robot-induced unemployment.
The trend of this Second Industrial Revolution, which is what the oncoming wave of robotics really amounts to, is quite clear. No matter how the experts may try to ignore the facts, or argue against them, the robots are getting smarter, cheaper, and more skilled. They will be taking over more and more jobs as the years go on. Inevitably, most of the jobs that can be done twice the same way—be they in a factory or an office—will be done by robots and/or computers.
Where does that leave the workers? Not everyone put out of work by automation can be absorbed into new jobs. A forty-year-old assembly-line worker is not going to blossom into an electronics technician. A young secretary is not going to turn into a computer programmer after six weeks of retraining. Besides, those jobs will also be threatened by robotics and automation, eventually. The machines are learning how to reproduce themselves.
Congressman Don Fuqua, chairman of the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee, is one of the few politicians who is doing something about the robot revolution, rather than merely making speeches about “high tech.”
Fuqua has drafted legislation that calls for a doublepronged approach to the problems—and opportunities—of robotics. To combat robot-induced unemployment, Fuqua wants the National Science Foundation to begin training programs for workers. He foresees a program that starts at the $5 million level and increases to $10 million per year through 1990.
A human job might be replaced by a robot, Fuqua maintains, but “somebody’s got to operate the robot, and keep it working. And somebody’s got to build that robot.” What is needed, then, is to help workers to elevate their levels of skills so that they can take part in the robot revolution, rather than be sidelined by it.
“There’s a whole new shift in employment skills, to a higher level. There are a lot of different jobs that will be created by the use of robots,” he says.
Fuqua admits that some workers will not be retrainable, for reasons varying from age to ambition. “They may not desire to have their skills upgraded.”
The legislation he is proposing does not deal merely with the unemployment problems created by robotics. The other side of Fuqua’s approach sets up a robot leasing
The problem of future employment is mainly a problem of education. “There has always been a group of people who, for one reason or another, did not get educated,” Frosch says. “We have never completely succeeded in finding out how to deal with the whole population in terms of education.” Up until now, there have always been productive jobs for uneducated, unskilled workers. But that day is going fast.
“Do we end up with a de facto class structure?” he worries, seeing a nation with a permanently unemployed and unemployable caste. “That’s a bad business. It’s morally bad, it’s socially bad... I don’t think it’s enough to simply say that it’s a social justice problem and we have to see that somehow everybody gets fed.”
Very few thinkers have even considered how to handle the human and social impact of the robot invasion. The engineers are busy designing better machines, the entrepreneurs are carving out new markets for robots, the business managers are trading off the costs of buying robots against the productivity gains they stand to produce, labor leaders are trying to protect their workers from robot-induced unemployment.
The trend of this Second Industrial Revolution, which is what the oncoming wave of robotics really amounts to, is quite clear. No matter how the experts may try to ignore the facts, or argue against them, the robots are getting smarter, cheaper, and more skilled. They will be taking over more and more jobs as the years go on. Inevitably, most of the jobs that can be done twice the same way—be they in a factory or an office—will be done by robots and/or computers.
Where does that leave the workers? Not everyone put out of work by automation can be absorbed into new jobs. A forty-year-old assembly-line worker is not going to blossom into an electronics technician. A young secretary is not going to turn into a computer programmer after six weeks of retraining. Besides, those jobs will also be threatened by robotics and automation, eventually. The machines are learning how to reproduce themselves.
Congressman Don Fuqua, chairman of the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee, is one of the few politicians who is doing something about the robot revolution, rather than merely making speeches about “high tech.”
Fuqua has drafted legislation that calls for a doublepronged approach to the problems—and opportunities—of robotics. To combat robot-induced unemployment, Fuqua wants the National Science Foundation to begin training programs for workers. He foresees a program that starts at the $5 million level and increases to $10 million per year through 1990.
A human job might be replaced by a robot, Fuqua maintains, but “somebody’s got to operate the robot, and keep it working. And somebody’s got to build that robot.” What is needed, then, is to help workers to elevate their levels of skills so that they can take part in the robot revolution, rather than be sidelined by it.
“There’s a whole new shift in employment skills, to a higher level. There are a lot of different jobs that will be created by the use of robots,” he says.
Fuqua admits that some workers will not be retrainable, for reasons varying from age to ambition. “They may not desire to have their skills upgraded.”
The legislation he is proposing does not deal merely with the unemployment problems created by robotics. The other side of Fuqua’s approach sets up a robot leasing
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