Friday, January 30, 2015

Neutrality on the Robopocalypse

I’ve had a few posts in the past few months (here and here) about the consequences of mechanization for the future of work. In short, what will we do when the robots take our jobs?

I wouldn’t call myself a techno-optimist. I don’t think the arrival of robots necessarily makes everything better. But I do not buy the strong techno-pessimism that comes up in many places. Richard Serlin has been a frequent commenter on this blog, and he generally has a gloomy take on where we are going to end up once the robots arrive. I’m not bringing up Richard to pick on him. He writes thoughtful comments on this subject (and lots of others), and it is those comments that pushed me to try and be more clear on why I’m “techno-neutral”.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is a mostly realistic view, I'd wager. Throughout history, both pessimists and optimists have been fantastically wrong in their predictions. Part of the reason seems to be from a natural tendency of the world's to mitigate extremes. Future paths simply don't swing to the optimistic of pessimistic side; they oscillate and balance out closer to neutrality.

So will robots be a golden boon? I don't think so. I also don't think they'll cause that much trouble -- the world will adjust around whatever happens into a "new normal".

And maybe that's the key as to why optimistic and pessimistic predictions so squarely fail in amplitude: as the process unfolds in time, we adjust and it becomes the next stage of "normal".

In the end, it seems incredibly tough to cause actual catastrophes. But they can and will happen, just never like we'd think or expect.