I was a child in the 1960’s, and one of my
favorite cartoons was “The Jetsons.”
I expected that my future would look like
the world portrayed in the show—I particularly wanted to jet around in my
personal rocket ship. (I didn’t play too much attention to how boringly
conventional the family structure was—dad goes to a dull job while mom goes
shopping.)
In the 1950s and 60s the technological advances of the twentieth century inspired dreams of a future of leisure. “Design for Dreaming” wonderfully illustrates these dreams (This is the MST3K version and well worth watching!), including technology that liberates women from the drudgery of housework. And that has come true: I can remember my mother laboriously defrosting our refrigerator on a regular basis. Now my refrigerator does the work for me.
But as the century wore on it seemed like the
grandiose dreams of the future were just a fantasy. What happened to our
personal rocket ships? We did get lots of new technologies, like computers and
smartphones that have made life more interesting and productive, but they have
also made our lives more complex and caused us to work more, not less.
What happened to that dream of leisure?
Kevin Drum warns in a recent Mother Jones magazine article (May/June 2013,
“Welcome Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?”), that most of us will soon be living
lives of leisure, but it’s not going to be pleasant.
He provides a fascinating analogy to
describe how the foundation for this future has been building so slowly that we
are mostly oblivious to it; but we are just a decade or so away from seeing it
transform our world (see the bottom of the article for a description of this
analogy).
The essence is that artificial
intelligence (AI) and robots have been steadily increasing in computational
ability and numbers, and they are about to put almost everyone out of work. In
fact, Drum suggests that this is already happening: this is why the
unemployment rate has stayed so stubbornly high in the last few years.
When is the last time someone pumped your
gas for you? Think of how many service station attendant jobs have been
eliminated. Grocery
store cashiers are soon to be obsolete. How many receptionists have been
put out of work by businesses using interactive phone answering software?
Some new products coming that will reduce
the need for humans in other jobs: driverless cars mean we’ll no longer need taxi
drivers; implants
that sense an impending heart attack and call 911 via your smartphone will
reduce the need for all kinds of medical services; computers that grade student’s
papers and scan legal documents eliminate the need for teacher’s assistants and
lawyers.
