In defense of robots

“We are a wild and reckless people,” the upper class Philadelphia diarist Sidney George Fisher lamented in 1857. “Railroads enable the masses to travel 20 miles an hour and carry emigrants beyond the Missouri at a low rate, but some 600 to 1,000 are killed by them every year.”

Yes indeed, there once was a time when 20 miles an hour seemed a wild and reckless speed. Yet humans adapted, and more than 150 years later, after passenger trains were largely displaced by even faster planes and even more convenient automobiles, another astute commentator, the noted public intellectual Tony Judt, wrote a two-part lament in the New York Review of Books titled “Bring Back the Rails!” In hindsight, Judt wrote, the great rococo or neo-Gothic or Beaux Arts train stations of the past, which once seemed to us like exercises in wretched excess, can now be seen “as their designers and contemporaries saw them: as the cathedrals of their age, to be preserved for their sake and for ours.”

An end to poverty?

So it goes. One century’s technological apocalypse is another century’s nostalgia. Today’s great threat to humanity, we are told, comes from robots and algorithms, which will throw most of us out of work while enslaving us to machines much as the computer Hal did in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. As machines evolve faster than people, warns the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

The current issue of the New York Review (April 2) contains a long and unusually overheated piece entitled, “How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over,” in which Sue Halpern, a technology scholar at Middlebury College, assumes the 21st-century mantle of Sidney George Fisher. “It’s not just that computers seem to be infiltrating every aspect of our lives,” she declares, “it’s that they have infiltrated them and are infiltrating them with breathless rapidity. It’s not just that life seems to have speeded up, it’s that it has. And that speed, and that infiltration, appear to have a life of their own.”

Halpern concedes that automation produces quicker drug development, more accurate medical diagnoses, cheaper material goods, greater energy efficacy, the whole nine yards. Hawking goes even further: Artificial intelligence, he writes, may provide the tools for the eventual eradication of disease and poverty. It’s the presumed trade-off — the loss of human control — that concerns them.

Halpern also acknowledges that, throughout the 20th century, automation has often been blamed for destroying jobs, yet employment has always bounced back. But this time, she insists, things are different: “While the pattern looks familiar, the worry is that this time around, machines really will undermine the labor force.”

Of course, there’s no such thing in the world as an unmixed blessing — you always pay a price for progress, and nobody can predict the future. Much of how you respond to this issue depends on whether you see your glass as half-empty (Halpern’s) or half-full (mine). But Halpern raises two points that strike me as especially wifty.

Resentment of the new rich

First, Halpern seems to resent the fact that a few young high-tech wizards are making billions in this brave new technological world. “Of the 15 wealthiest Americans,” she notes, “six own digital technology companies, the oldest of which, Microsoft, has been in existence only since 1975.” To me, the fact that a few kids could displace the supposedly entrenched industrial and oil fortunes of the ’70s offers hope that some other bright entrepreneurs could displace today’s seemingly entrenched tech billionaires before too long. (Glass half-full, again.)

More to the point, every major new technological advance — the steam engine in the 18th century, railroads in the 19th, automobiles and mass production in the 20th, and the Internet in the 21st — has brought disproportionate fortunes to its developers, and why not? Would you really begrudge Thomas Edison the fortune he made from electric lights?

Desperation on the farm

More bizarre still is Halpern’s suggestion that “automation dulls the brain, removing the need to pay attention or master complicated routines or think creatively and react quickly.” The result, she says, is affecting “our very humanness — what makes us who we are as individuals" — not to mention “our humanity — what makes us who we are in aggregate.”

Halpern declines to identify exactly whose humanity flourished back in the good old pre-robotic days when most people worked on assembly lines or in coal mines or in office typing pools, not to mention the good old pre-drone days when faceless regimented soldiers were blown to kingdom come in trenches or massed infantry charges, or — the really good old days — when nine out of every ten Americans spent 80 hours a week working on farms. Having written a book about the opening of the American West during the 1850s, I can attest that the great outpouring of volunteers to fight in both the Mexican War and the Civil War had little to do with patriotism and everything to do with farmers’ desperation to flee the deadening — yes, you might even say dehumanizing — tedium of milking cows and feeding hogs from sunup to sundown, day after day.

Penn Mutual’s worker bees

But let me cite a more recent example closer to home: Philadelphia’s Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, which I studied in the 1990s while researching its history. As late as the early 1970s — that is, before computers took over— Penn Mutual employed 2,000 people at its home office on Independence Mall. Of those 2,000, only about 50 — the managers — were college graduates. The remaining 1,950 essentially played the role of drones in a beehive, performing repetitive, mechanical tasks in a vast paper-flowing operation in which every function — applications, loans, cash surrenders, death claims, all of them requiring multiple forms, verifications, and approvals — was performed by hand. Platoons of women were employed as “slip clerks” (who entered data on actuarial slips) and “frowsy clerks” (a name of unknown origin applied to those who searched for data from cases for which actuarial slips were missing). An entire half-floor of people worked on nothing but policy changes, methodically checking and rechecking each other’s calculations to make sure the figures were correct. Clerks on such a floor could look left or right at rows upon rows of wooden desks, but they would not see their supervisor, who sat behind them at the rear of the room, the better to observe his subordinates and make certain they kept busy. The clerks hired to perform this work were mostly high school graduates who harbored few ambitions and were not expected to think for themselves or even to understand the processes they implemented. Only supervisors were provided with telephones and, except in extreme cases, clerks were not allowed to make or accept personal calls.

The work of a Penn Mutual home office employee through the 1960s may seem stifling in retrospect, but few people perceived it that way at the time. Many had been hired during the Depression, so job security — even boring job security — was their top priority.

Ah, yes — the good old days, when work was ennobling.

Computers eliminated all those jobs, of course. Today, Penn Mutual manages a far greater array of financial products and more than ten times the revenues of the ’70s with a home office staff of only about 800 people, nearly all of whom are engaged in mentally challenging work instead of shuffling papers.

In that case, at least, computers turned out to be a liberating force. Robots could do the same. When push comes to shove, even the most confirmed nostalgiamaniac would rather live in the present than the past (would you really like to be treated by a Victorian dentist?). Why, then, do so many smart people fail to imagine that the future might be better than the present?