The Robots Are Coming for Our Jobs (Again!)

When Marty McFly walks to the Hill Vally Courthouse Square, on October 21, 2015, one of the first things he sees is a Texaco gas station. Marty is shocked by this gas station, because it sits on a second story, above a 7-Eleven. Flying cars land on the upper deck, immediately being serviced by a dozen robot arms that check the tires, wash the windows and pump Havoline. No humans are involved in the process.

We, too, are shocked by this, because we live in 2020 and we don’t have any flying cars. The real future is boring compared to the colorful theme park version displayed in Back to the Future Part II: we don’t have realistic holograms (at least not that I know of. What if there are super realistic holograms? What if I am a hologram? Stay tune and I might write a blog about the nature of my reality), we don’t have Jaws 19 (but we have 9 Fast & Furious movies and one spin off), nobody walks the streets dressed like they are auditioning to be a dancer in a Lady Gaga music video (sadly), and perhaps worst of all, we don’t have Hover Boards.

Predicting the future horribly wrong is common among movies that try to do so, and yet Back to the Future Part II will always win top prize to worst prediction ever, due to one thing: the restaurant with stationary exercise bikes for diners to pedal on while they eat.

A movie that better honors the spirit of our times is WALL-E, not only because the passengers of Axiom have degenerated into helpless corpulence due to laziness and microgravity, their every whim catered to by machines while they fly through outer-space (the total opposite of “biking while eating a burger”), but because WALL-E is a simple trash compactor robot.

Marty’s future is a rare example in which automation is kind of nice. Most science fiction turns towards the dark, scary corners of our collective consciousness to exploits those fears on the back of our minds in which we are always worrying about robots coming to take our jobs, and subsequently, our lives. WALL-E’s future, on the other hand, is the rare example in which automation is about cleaning robots, and that has never been more true than in these COVID-scarred times.

The last 500 years have been really crazy for us humans. The Scientific Revolution started in 1543, when Copernicus published On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres. This pave the way for the Industrial Revolution that started in 1760 and which, one could argue, has not yet ended. Before the Scientific Revolution, for about 2000 years, people did the same sort of jobs, served some kind or other of king or queen, dressed the same, ate the same. For a long time, life didn’t change too much, family structures didn’t chance much, education didn’t change much and professions didn’t change much. Now take a look at our last century, forget about two world wars and splitting the atom, and only consider how unsettling it must have been for that generation of people who used to work in agriculture to have lost their jobs to “developmental technology of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides”. I consider myself a fairly educated person, and yet after a comprehensive Google search, I still don’t understand what some of these words mean. So there’s no doubt that the massive groups of jobless people from the 20th Century were confused by this disruptive technologies.

Nevertheless, these people didn’t stay jobless forever, they moved from the farms to the cities, and after training, some got jobs at Ford car factories, some were hired as cashiers at Walmart, some started packaging stuff on warehouses. The same happened in China, and basically in every industrialized nation. That was then, so what now? What is the big threat of automation now? Well, I think the threat is pretty much the same, only at a faster speed, in a bigger scale.

Because our world is more interdependent than ever, the rise of artificial intelligence and skillful robots threatens to take the jobs away from the poorest of the poor, those people in places like Guatemala, Bangladesh, Indonesia. First, let’s think about the scale part of automation in the 21st Century. Consider this Automation in Texas scenario:

If automated scanning machines take the jobs of thousands of cashiers at a Walmart in a place like Texas, these people probably won’t stay jobless forever. Walmart will most likely offer most of them a different job (since it’s virtually impossible to fired all those people without dealing with a couple of lawsuits from the ACLU). Those who are not offered any jobs or help from Walmart, would probably find some help from the state of Texas, as well as the Federal Government. There are unemployment benefits, trainings, community colleges, scholarships, financial aid, and even mentioning of a ‘universal income’ by some politicians. This scenario can be replicated with companies like Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, etc. The problems of this scenario are real, and even though the solutions I have listed are not perfect, these solutions are real too, and these solutions offer options and the chance for open discussion, conversation and improvements upon said solutions. Now consider a Automation in Cambodia scenario:

If automated machines take the jobs of thousands of employees in a Nikes sweatshop in Cambodia, who’s going to offer jobs to those people? Are there any options for training, schooling, unemployment benefits? There are not, and by the way, when politicians in the US (or anywhere) talk about ‘universal income’, they don’t really mean the ‘universal’ part, because those people in Cambodia won’t be getting any money at all. Let’s go back to the Automation in Texas scenario, but this time let’s consider the speed part:

If a cashier from Walmart— who’s name is Maria and she is about 40 years old — loses her job to an automated scanning machine, with the help of unemployment benefits, trainings, community colleges, scholarships, financial aid, she may be able to learn what she always dreamed of doing: fashion design. After two or three years of hard work, she can become a seamstress who handcrafts beautiful beanie hats and she can make a living of it. But then, after two years, her business and sales completely stop because Amazon created a machine that sews better than any human. Maria is now jobless again, but she is resilient and she has always loved animals, so she goes back on unemployment benefits, trainings, community colleges, scholarships, financial aid and becomes a veterinarian technician after three years of schooling. She gets a job at a local vet clinic, but two years later Google creates a machine that basically executes all of Maria’s tasks, so Maria is fired again. Automation has always taken jobs away, thus displacing countless employees, there’s nothing new to that concept. The problem of our times, is how fast automation may take jobs away. Previously, the lost of jobs has happened in a fairly slow manner, usually once a generation. That may not be the case anymore.

With these scenarios, I want to point out a couple of possibilities that worried me and that I consider important for me and my generation to discuss. I think it’s critical for us to start these conversations and unite in solutions and answers. Here’s a list of my worries:

1. - Nobody really wants to work at a sweatshop or as a cashier, those are repetitive jobs. These kind of jobs numb people mentally and physically. That’s kind fo the reason these machines are being created. And I don’t think these automated machines are necessarily bad or evil, but even if they were bad or evil, I don’t think there’s any stopping now. The machines will be created, workers will be replaced, and new jobs will come into existence. It’s too late to go back, Pandora’s box is open.
2. Automation is a global dilemma that needs to be faced with global cooperation. If people in Texas and people in Honduras lose their jobs to machines, people in Texas might get some news jobs, nevertheless, those people in Honduras may not find any other jobs (Uber, DoorDash and all those side gigs are not available to everybody around the world). Those people will have to leave Honduras to find a way to make a living somewhere else. That somewhere might be Texas. That’s why people in places like Texas cannot dismiss themselves out of this dilemma. We’re in this together, all of us, wether we want it or not.
3. The speed of automation in our times is very fast. Nobody knows what the job market will look like in 50 years, thus nobody knows what we should teach our children. So then, what do we study? What do we invest in? I don’t know. I really like Yuval Noah Harari’s books (this blog is kind of my take on 21 Lessons for the 21st Century). Harari essentially recommends investing in emotional intelligence. Teach our children to meditate, to know themselves, to be resilient and flexible enough to reinvent themselves often, just like Maria. What happens when a 50 year old truck driver working at Amazon loses his job to self-driving trucks? How many times can he reinvent himself? Does he want to do so? How attach is our identity to our job? I’ve been asking myself these questions for the past year, because I too lost my job when the Coronavirus pandemic started and the economy shutdown. Finally, speaking of Coronavirus, I’ll be writing a blog about how does automation looks with Coronavirus, and after it. Stay tuned, and don’t forget to subscribe!