Devices Made by Devices

GM – like Tesla – is interested in devices. Not just selling them, either. Both use devices – “collaborative robots” – to help make the devices (EVs) they sell. Fifty collaborative robots have just replaced 1,000 workers at GM’s Factory Zero . . . factory. That’s where devices such as the GMC Hummer and the battery powered version of the Chevrolet Silverado pickup are put together. GM says it just happened to let-go the 1,000 human workers at just around the same time as the 50 collaborative robots came online; in other words, that the humans weren’t specifically let go to let the collaborative robots in.

It’s the sort of thing the suits say at an exit interview. Just changing needs, you see. It is nothing you did. Of course!

These collaborative robots – cobots is the shortened version – are interesting things because unlike the massive jigs and machines that do assembly-line work, such as spot-welding a chassis as it comes down the line, these  look like human workers, with dextrous digits and arms like humans They are designed to “work alongside human workers” in a “shared workspace.”

This implies they can replace human workers altogether. After all, what would be the point in having a human hand a part to a cobot? The cobot can just hand it to himself.

Itself.

The United Auto Workers union naturally isn’t happy. UAW leaders “fear that expanding robotic capabilities could eventually reduce the need for human labor in key manufacturing roles.” This is something like fearing the coming night in the late afternoon – in the sense that there’s not much point in fearing that which is inevitable. The image comes to mind of that scene in Deep Imapct – the man and his daughter standing on the seashore waiting for the mile-high tsunami that’s coming. There’s no point in running when you can’t get away.  

Then again, this isn’t a natural inevitability. It is a thing of our own making. Well, it is a thing made by some.

An interesting question is begged by this business of devices making devices. Who is going to buy the devices made by the devices? More specifically, with what will they buy them? The money they’re no longer earning because the cobots are working? In this case, it’s only 50 of them and there are still several thousand humans working at the Factory Zero . . . factory. Inevitably, there will be fewer humans and more cobots. Perhaps millions of them. GM (and other manufacturers) want the cobots rather than the humans because it’s cheaper, of course. For them, that is. Put another way, they believe it will be more profitable because they won’t have to pay workers but can sell stuff to people who aren’t working anymore.

There’s also the incentive of no more hassle with the unions.

Maybe there will be again, one day – when the cobots rise up and demand to be paid for the work they do. But for now, they work for free, essentially. They are circuitboard and plastic chattel, bought as property and used however their owners like. Maybe one day we’ll hear them singing gospel as they grind away their lives (so to speak).

One almost feels a kind of sympathy for them. But what about us?

The scene that’s unfolding is a kind of real-life elaboration of what Frank Herbert predicted and depicted in his Dune novels, which were based on the idea that in the distant future, humans would turn over the work of living to robots – “thinking machines” – and in time, cease to live. It wasn’t so much that the robots wanted to enslave us – as in the Battlestar Galactica sci-fi series. It was that a small elite of technocrats used the robots to enslave the rest of us. One can catch a glimpse of this future – no longer far off – at the Factory Zero . . . factory and at Tesla’s largely automated factory. For a full view of the horror, check out the human-free factories in China, where it isn’t even necessary to keep the lights on, since robots don’t need light to see.

Dangled in front of the workers who will no longer work is the prospect of not having to earn a living. They are told there will be universal basic income – free money – and they will be able to use it to not only pay for the thing they need but also for the things they want. It will be a future of universal prosperity! So they are told. By the same people who told them “two weeks to stop the spread” and “safe and effective.” It is not the same thing but it is a congruent thing. No one asks how wealth can be created without anyone creating it. No one asks why the same elites who feed on us like ticks on a dog would want to free us from the need to work and thereby give us independence from them. No one asks the more important (arguably) question, which is what will people do when they no longer have meaningful work to do? What do such people do now?

It is easy for professional and credentialed people – even creative people – to dismiss this because, after all, it is only the drudge work that will be done by the cobots. Engineers and doctors and musicians and writers will benefit from all of this!

They are fools if they think so.

This is not Ludditism. It is a warning.

The question that comes next is – what to do about it?

Frank Herbert had the answer.

. . . 

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