Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? Here in the United States, we are celebrating Labor Day, a federal holiday here in the States. Also one that I find really interesting because it's all about celebrating the American labor movement. But if you pay attention, especially in the tech space, there are a lot of entities out there, a lot of companies that are eagerly opposing the labor movement and trying to do things like prevent workers from organizing and forming unions. Yeah, a complicated thing that we have a holiday to celebrate it, and yet we have plenty of examples of companies and organizations out there dedicated to venting more labor organization from happening. But let's put aside all of that. I thought, since we're on holiday today, I wanted to make sure that you had an episode anyway. So we're going to actually listen to an episode that came out a few years ago, back in twenty twenty July thirteenth, twenty twenty. In fact, it is titled The Robots Are Coming for Your Job, and it's all about robots and automated systems and the anxiety that exists around this idea of automation eliminating jobs, which I think has only become even more of a talking point in the wake of things like generative AI, for example. So let's listen to this episode from twenty twenty, the Robots Are Coming for Your Job, and I'll chat with you again at the end. I read a lot of tech news and sometimes that ends up inspiring me to do an episode of tech stuff. That happened to me recently when I read this headline off of the website tech Spot. Sony factory assembles PS four in thirty seconds, only four humans involved in the process. A PS four, in case you're not aware, is a PlayStation four video game consoles. So this factory can build a video game console from parts in half a minute and only four human beings touch the ding dang thing in the process. Those four humans, by the way, are involved in the beginning and the end of the process. Two of them load motherboards onto the assembly line, and a motherboard is the primary circuit board for a computer system, and the other two human beings are at the end of the assembly line, and their job is to package the completed consoles. All the actual assembly work is done by robots. Now you may be experiencing a couple of different responses to this information. I know I did. One of those was a wow, that's seriously impressive. The PS four, like many computer systems, has a lot of components, many of which attached to one another by wire or cable. So these robots have to be able to take these flexible components and to join them in their proper anchor points with the appropriate amount of pressure and precision to make a good connection. Now, if any of you out there have ever built your own PC, you know that plugging cables in can get a little tricky depending on the layout of the motherboard and the various components. And if you're someone like me, you're likely putting stuff together only to realize that maybe you should have done some of that before you mounted them in a computer case, because now you just don't have the space to work in properly. So it's pretty darn impressive that robots can do this consistently and correctly at that level of speed. Another response I had was kind of scary. I mean, typically you would have dozens of people employed on the assembly line to do this sort of work, but in this factory it's been stripped down to thirty two robots and four human beings. The article in textpot points out that twenty six of those thirty two robots are just attaching flexible components together inside the console. Now, I have no idea how much these robots cost, but I wager that they are expensive enough to equal the salary of a standard human employee on the assembly line. However, you don't pay robots. You do have to spend money to maintain and repair them, but assuming whatever you're making is going to be around for a little while, they'll pay for themselves because eventually you'll get to a point where the salaries you'd be paying for humans would be more than the purchase and maintenance cost of the robots. And the increase in efficiency means you can produce a whole lot more stuff in a given amount of time than you would with a human centric assembly line, so you'll have more product to sell in a shorter amount of time. When you start crunching numbers, you discover your robotic assembly line can make more stuff at a lower cost over a given period of time, like you know, over a couple of years, than what you would accomplish with human beings on that assembly line. So you don't have to worry about the robots taking a vacation. They don't take sick time, they don't even take the night off. They can work around the clock. They don't need health insurance, though I would guess that most companies ensure the heck out of these things just in case one breaks down. But from a financial point of view, they make sense if you're building stuff at a large enough scale, stuff like video game consoles for the PlayStation four. It's a no brainer because that console has sold around one hundred and ten million units so far. That's a number large enough that I can't even imagine what it would look like if you had all those consoles together in one place. So if there's enough demand for you to sell one hundred and ten million whatever it is you want to sell, you need to have a way to make those as efficiently as possible, and that will help maximize your profits. And the more efficient the process, the more competitively you can price your product and still make a profit. But the idea of robots performing jobs far more effectively, consistently, and efficiently than humans raises a lot of questions. And these are not new questions either, but they are questions like if more factories rely on robots for production, particularly if those robots can be programmed to produce new products once older ones go obsolete, what happens to the job market, What happens to the millions of people who work in manufacturing on assembly lines? They go? What will this do to economies around the world. Lots of people have tried to answer these questions, sometimes giving drastically different answers. And we're going to take a look at the history and evolution of industrial robots in this episode and explore the ramifications of automated manufacturing. And this is where I dive into history. I've talked about the history of robots before, so I'll try to restrict my focus to industrial robots. And before I get into that, let's just address the fact that the use of machinery to increase efficiency has been a controversial subject since long before there ever was such a thing as a robot. Generally speaking, machines are meant to make work easier or in some cases make the work possible just to begin with, they are labor saving devices, requiring humans to put forth less effort to get the same or better results. This applies to the simplest of machines, I mean stuff like levers or pulleys or an inclined plane, and it applies to very complex machines as well. Before the Industrial Revolution, most stuff like textiles was made by crafts people out of their own homes. This was literally the cottage industry. Trades people would travel and become the lifeline for the cottage industry, supplying raw materials, buying finished products, and selling those products off at a profit elsewhere. Many tradespeople built a good deal of wealth working this way, and they had the means to look at alternatives to this decentralized cottage industry approach. An idea began to form. If you brought together crafts people to a centralized location, and if you simplified the process of production, you could make way more stuff, which in turn means you could sell way more stuff, which in turn means you can make way more money, and money makes the world go round. This thought process helped fuel a similar line of thinking. If you could design machines that could do a lot of work that typically fell to skilled crafts people. You wouldn't need the crafts people at all. You could train anyone, even if that person had no experience with the process, just to work the machine. And while it might take years of dedication to go through the process of being an apprentice to learn a trade well enough so that you can actually make a living at it, with a machine, you can skip right over that. As long as the machine's end product was good enough. It didn't have to be better than the stuff crafts people were making. It just had to be good enough and cheap enough and fast enough to produce. Then you could sell the finished product at a lower cost than what crafts people would charge because not as much time and effort went into making the thing. Now, I guess it's clunky to talk about this while using an example, so let's go with a poster child for the Industrial Revolution, weaving. The weaving trade is an ancient one, and it requires a good deal of skill to do it well by hand. In the late seventeen hundreds, a man named Edmund Cartwright patented a loom powered by a water wheel. The loom's operation was such that a person who had no training in weaving could operate the machine and produce finished textiles. Cartwright's design would be built upon by other inventors who had turned to steam power and other means to operate the power loom. Many cottage industry weavers found themselves out of work. They could potentially opt to work in the textile factories, as those were popping up all over the place, particularly in England, but the wages were low. As you can imagine, this didn't sit well with the weavers. There were protests, including some that incorporated violence and destruction. Ultimately, the factory process won out, and along with it some really awful working conditions followed, including stuff like child labor and ridiculously low wages and dangerous working conditions. This led to more protests, including the type that would give us the word sabotage. And let's get a quick side note on that one, as it is the source of a little mythology or misinformation. See The apocryphal story goes that the word sabotage comes from the word sabo, which describes the wooden shoes worn by laborers, mainly Dutch laborers, but also laborers in France. And according to the story, these laborers wore those shoes and used them to great effect. In an effort to protest the conditions and factories, they would toss their wooden shoes into the machinery to break the various gears and literally grind production to a halt, as it were. But this story, while compelling, isn't really the truth. Sabotage does stem from the word sabo, but in French there is a verb sabote. This verb means to make a loud noise with wooden shoes. Now isn't it great that there's a verb for that? And it makes sense wooden shoes would make a great deal of racket as people would walk around. Heck, if a toddler wore wooden shoes, I think it would probably sound as though the world were shaking apart. I don't know how toddlers manage to sound like they weigh eight hundred pounds, but they do it. And if you have a toddler, you know what I'm talking about. And in the culture of France, the idea of a clumsy slow worker was often linked to someone who wore wooden shoes because they're awkward to wear anyway, The reason sabote led to sabotage is because factory workers who were protesting their work conditions and wages would purposefully work more slowly and less efficiently in order to affect the overall output of a factory. It was related to a similar strategy that British laborers employed, and their version was called kakani. It was a saying from Scotland which essentially means don't do so much man now. I would argue this also feeds into a strategy that we see to this very day in certain government offices, where the idea is there's no need to do too much too quickly, as it doesn't result in increased compensation and it also sets a really high bar of expectation, so why not just take it easy? You know, I don't have a coffee break now. In the early twentieth century, people began to use the word sabotage to really refer to a purpose full approach to undermining the output of factories, and it had nothing to do with tossing wooden shoes into machinery, though it did also pertain to instances in which workers purposefully damaged equipment and tried to slow down the production that way. While this isn't directly tied to the idea that machines themselves are displacing workers, it is related to the effect of moving toward a manufacturing based economy and how that allows for the exploitation of workers. The machines themselves aren't really at fault, but they facilitate the system of operations that leads to exploitation. Now that's something that'll be a theme in this episode, and we can't ignore the social aspect of what's going on here, or else we miss the whole point. But let's skip ahead. I've spoken about this before, but we get the word robot from a check author named Kyl Kopek. He wrote a pl called Rossum's Universal Robots or R you Are in nineteen twenty. Kopek took an older word rabota, which means forced labor in Europe. This concept was tied to that of the old system of serfdom, in which people would do work on behalf of a landowner. In return, those people would be allowed to live on part of that landowner's land. In ru are factory owners devise a way to build laborers from raw materials. Now in the play, they are indistinguishable from humans other than they have no inner desires. But in the course of the play, these laborers eventually take over all the jobs that humans previously held, and humans themselves become a threatened species as these laborers begin to understand the power that they hold by occupying all the positions of employment, including as soldiers in the military. And so with the introduction of the concept of robot, we actually get the very first robotic uprising all the way back in nineteen twenty. See I told you it was an old idea. It's important to remember that in the play, the robots are nearly identical to humans. They aren't mechanical the way our robots of today are, but the idea of creating machines that can do work without a will of their own is a part of robotics in general, and industrial robotics in particular. When we come back, we'll talk about the earliest industrial robots and what they did, But first let's take a quick break. It's interesting to me that the tech world adopted the term robot when we think about the origins of that word. In Cope's work, robots were sentient slaves. They could perform the work humans would otherwise do, but they lack the emotions that humans have, and the whole idea is that these devices could do our work for us without question or protest. They would, in theory, endure conditions that people wouldn't or couldn't, But in the play they ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race and potentially they become the new dominant species on the planet. Now. I say potentially because part of the play's plot involves the destruction of the formula that scientists use to produce the robots in the first place. That is an important plot point. The robots are not sure how to make more robots, so they might just die out. Now, it seems to me as though that's a pretty emotionally charged term to adopt for an entire discipline of technology, right, robots, Especially if you are actually aware of that play, and by the way, I recommend people read it. It's a good play. But then a lot of people are not aware of the origins of the word, or at least not beyond knowing that it came from a play in the nineteen twenty So I guess for them, it's just, you know, a word. A robot by any other name would smell as sweet as it were. And we've definitely seen the themes of rure serving as an undercurrent for stuff that's happening in robotics in general. But let's move ahead. In nineteen fifty four, an engineer named George Duvault designed an industrial robot. He was nine years old when Kopek coined the term robot. He called his design the Programmed Article Transferred Device, for which he received a US patent in nineteen sixty one. This machine was a robotic arm, and it was capable of picking up something and then transferring it a short distance away, just within reach of the arm. The arm itself couldn't move, it was anchored in place. It could also follow. In fact, this is the important part, It would follow a pre program series of instructions to do this. Deval's argument for his device was that up to this point, mechanical handling of objects fell into two broad categories. Either stuff got moved by humans, typically operating a powerful machine like a crane or a forklift, or stuff got moved by a device that operated under cam control. Now, manual control is self explanatory, so let's talk about cams. A cam is a rotating component in machinery. Typically a cam has some variation in its surface. So let's start with a wheel. Just imagine a wheel that is spinning on an axle. Well, you wouldn't typically have a perfectly smooth wheel as a cam. Part of that surface might be flat, or it might have dips in it, And when the cam rotates, these variations apply force to some other mechanical component that is held against the cam, and it causes that mechanical component to move in specific ways. A cam operating system can work on its own, but it will always repeat the exact same motions As long as everything is working, it'll just repeat those steps. Once the cams complete a full systematic rotation, you can't really adapt it to do anything else. The movements depend entirely on the cams themselves, so if you wanted it to do something else, you would at first have to swap out the cams, and even then you would be under whatever the limitations of the device was itself, like it wouldn't have full range of motion. Moreover, this level of specialization also means that it's typically really expensive to rely upon cam based systems, so it was really only useful if the application had to do with mass manufacturing or else you're looking at an economic loss. The cost of the system was just too much. So Devaal was proposing a machine that could be programmed to do operations. And this would let a programmer create different processes using the same machine. Or you could get a whole bunch of the same basic machine and program each one to do a particular job. Meanwhile, you'd free people up to work on other stuff in the manufacturing process, and you could take the most dangerous stuff and give it to the robots. Now, the story goes that Daval was at a party in nineteen fifty six and he got into a conversation with a man named Joseph Engelberger. Joseph was a scientist and an entrepreneur, and when the subject turned to Deval's programmed article transferred device, as well as the work of a science fiction author known as Isaac Asimov, you know, the father of robotics. He famously incorporated a concept of the laws of robotics in his works. We won't really go into that in this episode, but the laws of robotics still play a big part in the discipline of robotics in general. But it's kind of outside the focus of this episode. Ingelberger used his connections to get funding for devauld to create a more advanced version of the programmed article transfer machine, and it would be a robotic arm capable of making repeated, precise movements while holding very heavy objects. They called it the Unimate Unimate, and the first prototype, Unimate zero zero one, would go to General Motors to work on a die casting assembly line. Now, according to the company robot Works, that's a WRX. This robot cost around sixty five thousand dollars to produce, and Ingelberger sold it off at a tremendous loss. General Motors only paid eighteen thousand dollars for a sixty five thousand dollars machine. But Ingelberger really wanted to establish that robotics were a way to perform repetitive, dangerous functions at a lower risk to humans. Welding die cast components on autobodies was a great first application of industrial robots for a few reasons. Die Casting is a process involving molten metal. You take that molten metal and you force it into steel molds, and these are water called dyes. The molten metal cools in the exact shape of the mold. So this is a way to make or cast a bunch of identical parts out of metal and get consistent quality out of it rather than forging each piece and then fitting them together. A dye can have complex shapes in it, such as external threads, which means you don't have to make a pipe, for example, and then do a secondary process on that pipe to get the result you want, So you wouldn't have to carve those threads into a otherwise smooth pipe. You could just cast the pipe with the threads incorporated on it already. But welding die cast parts onto autobodies is hard work. The components are really heavy, so you're at risk of immediate injury if something goes wrong, like let's say you drop a weighty component on your foot, or you might develop a repetitive stress injury after going through the same welding motions over and over again. In addition, the fumes given off while welding were sometimes toxic still are, so it's not great to have people exposed to them for very long. So a robot was a great substitute for a person. The robot could handle much greater weight than people could The robot didn't breathe, so there was no respiratory issue there, and it didn't get tired. I mean, it would wear down over time, but you could repair it in fairly short order. The Unimate worked with computer controlled hydraulic systems. A hydraulic system uses a liquid that's under pressure in order to do work like pushing against a piston to power an actuator of some sort like lift a platform. The UNIMATE zero zero one weighed twenty seven hundred pounds or about one two hundred and twenty five kilograms, and it could work twenty four hours a day, placing components with a precision of within one fifty thousandth of an inch. Now I'm not going to do the conversion on that, because I think it's sufficient to say that it was just really precise. According to a charmingly dated newsreel from Britain, complete with swinging sixties music that sounded like it came straight off an Austin Powers movie, the robot could operate for five hundred hours without the need for a human to check in on it. Engelberger, a savvy businessman and promoter, would arrange for Unimate to show what it could do at trade shows and on TV appearances, including one on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. If you don't know who that is, ask your parents, and if they don't know, ask your grandparents. Nineteen sixty nine, General Motors had jumped on board the robot train, as it were. They rebuilt a manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and they installed unimate robots to perform spot welding on car bodies, and the results spoke for themselves. The plant was capable of producing one hundred and ten cars per hour, which was more than double the speed that the plant could manage before the installation of the robots. The business case for the robots seemed clear. After a hefty upfront cost, you could produce way more stuff per day, and as long as the demand for that stuff is high enough, it could mean greater revenue. You could also bring the cost of production for an individual unit down. Then you could pass savings on to customers and get really competitive with your pricing, or you could just keep everything priced the same and try to increase your profit margin. The key to all this was that you had to be sure the thing you were producing would bring in enough money to offset the cost of automation, so it would not make sense to spend millions of dollars building out a factory staffed with robots. If you were making something that had a very small market to begin with, yes, you'd be able to produce way more Watching My colle its than you could before. But if the demand for Watchma collets is really modest, that doesn't do you any good. In fact, you might end up flooding the market and devaluing your product. So while robots were taking on jobs that were previously held by humans, there was no real danger of a massive upheaval where everything would be automated. The limitations in the technology were just too great and the cost was too high for most companies to go that route. And this also became the starting point for something that would become really important that the main goal of developing industrial robots wasn't to displace humans. It was meant to offload duties that were dull, dirty, or days. You'll often hear those terms being used with robotics if it is a job that carries with it a significant risk to the person performing it, or a job so demanding that you can only expect a person to stick with it for a short while before they need to do something else. Then building a robot to do that job, or at least that list of tasks makes sense. The robot is just a thing. It can endure conditions that humans can't, and it doesn't get sick, and it doesn't get hurt. If something breaks down, you can typically repair it pretty quickly. We humans don't have that luxury. Now, I'm not going to go and run down a full history of all industrial robots because that would mostly involve me talking about model numbers with slight differences like the number of axes of movement or points of articulation for one robot versus another, and that's not really interesting. But I do want to hit a couple of highlights. One is that in nineteen seventy five, the ASEAB robot would be the first fully electrically driven robot. It also used Intel's first chip set as processors. Now, this was not a super strong robot because those electrically driven limbs just can't pack the same punch as a hydraulic system, which typically moves much more slowly but can handle much heavier payloads. So this particular robot could only lift weights up to around thirteen pounds or six kilograms, but the move toward processors and electrically driven components marked a big technological step, even if the arm's physical capabilities were much less impressive than a hydraulic system. By the end of the nineteen seventies, Japan was getting into the robotics game with arc welding robots for assembly lines, and then it was off to the robotic races, with the eighties seeing a surge in advances with industrial robots. Soon, massive manufacturing facilities were installing robots to take over elements of the assembly line process, particularly in that dirty, dull, and dangerous category. The robots became more sophisticated, which also added to their value. When we come back, I'll talk more about why that's important, but first let's take another quick break. By the mid nineteen nineties, robotics companies were making machines that could coordinate and synchronize the movements of more than one robot at the same time, allowing for more complex manufacturing processes. By the early two thousands, there were systems that could synchronize the actions of up to four robots at a time, further adding to the overall system flexibility. Now, I mentioned earlier that a programmable robot is more versatile than something like a cam operated system. Well, more sophisticated robots, with more axes of motion and more points of articulation have the potential to do lots of different types of jobs, and this is of critical importance. If the robot is too limited, if you can only do a small range of motions, you can't necessarily repurpose it for new processes. And as markets change, you may find yourself needing to be flexible when it comes to the stuff you're manufacturing. So let's use an extreme hypothetical example that would probably never happen. So let's say that you run an auto manufacturing facility, but then there's a massive market change and it drastically affects the demand for your cars. There's just not enough demand to support the production. So rather than just you know, closing up shop and calling it a day, your business decides to do an amazing pivot and you begin to convert your manufacturing facility over to I don't know, home appliances. Now, again, this is an extreme hypothetical example, but let's just go with it. Okay, So here we go. If the robots on your assembly line are powerful, but limited in movement and function. You may find it impossible to adapt them to your new line of business, which would mean you need to either invest in new robots or you'd have to hire human workers to put together your appliances. And it would also mean that your old robots would be a sunk cost. You would need to either sell them off or put them in storage or something. If the robots are really sophisticated, however, you might be able to program them to do some of the operations on the new assembly line, and that would keep them useful, it would lower the cost of production. Or, for a less extreme example, you introduce a new model of whatever thing it is that you're producing. Anything new will require adjustments in the assembly line process, and if the changes are big enough, the robots may not be able to make as big a contribution in the process. That's something that could happen with the example of the PlayStation we were talking about. Yeah, those robots can put together a PS four and thirty seconds. There's no guarantee they'll be able to do the same thing with a PS five, at least not without a major overhaul of their assembly line. System. While the manufacturing facility can churn out a finished PS four and thirty seconds, we might not see them work at all with PS five, at least not right away. It would all have to be optimized. So for decades, industrial robots were kept as separate from human workers as was possible. You wanted to keep them well away from all the people, or keep the people well away from all the robots. Often the robots would operate within cages specifically to limit the possibility of a human coming within range. After all, these robots are large, they're heavy, powerful, and many of them are incapable of sensing stuff in their environment and whether or not a human is within their range of motion. Instead, they're just going through that pre programmed series of motions and they're not going to stop unless someone turns it off. A robot is performing that same series of steps over and over, and that can mean that if a human in that area gets near the robot, they could end up getting injured or worse. And in fact, this has happened several times over the course of the last few decades, and at least in some cases it seems as though the robot might have been at fault meaning it's not always a case of human carelessness. For example, an engineer in twenty fifteen died when a robot armed from one section of the factory floor moved beyond its operating area and into the neighboring section that the engineer was working in. This is something that should not have happened. The robot arms should not have moved that far into the neighboring section. The robot arm hit the engineer on the head, and she later died from her injuries. In the United States, the government has listed thirty three workplace deaths due to accidents with industrial robots between the years nineteen eighty four and twenty fourteen. The investigations also found that the majority of those tragedies was typically the fault of human error. There was a person who was wandering into the operation zone of a robot. That twenty fifteen incident was an outlier. Not that any of this makes the thought of working around industrial robots less scary or those other accidents any less tragic. They're all terribly tragic. Moreover, we're seeing more robots that are capable of roaming a work space. They are no longer anchored to a specific spot on the floor. In some cases, they also, unlike the first industrial robots, typically have external sense. These not only help the robots navigate their environments, but also hopefully avoid accidents with human workers. Let's take Amazon's warehouse robots for example. These robots look like really big robotic vacuum cleaners. They are designed to roll under shelves and the shelves are just slightly larger than the dimensions of the robot. And when an order comes in, a robot from the warehouse rolls over to a shelf that holds the respective item on it according to the inventory system, and the robot goes under the shelf then lifts the shelf by raising a platter like platform on the top of the robot. Think of it as like a little fork left, except it's more like a I don't know, like a tray that a waiter would use to carry drinks to a table. But it carries the whole shelf up and over to the edge of a cage, where a human operator will take the respective item off the shelf and scan it and put it into a bin. And then those bins go to other humans who further scan those items and then put them into other bins that ultimately go to the packing department. And if you watch videos of these robots, it looks like they're doing a complicated ballet as they maneuver through this warehouse, avoiding other robots and shelves. As they bring those shelves to humans. Markings on the warehouse floor tell the robots where they are with respect to everything else in the warehouse, and the robots even will position shelves that have items that are being ordered a lot toward the edges of this space so that they're easier to get to and move them over to the human beings. So it's kind of an interesting dynamic system. It's not like they pick up the shelf and then bring the shelf immediately right back to where it started. The shelf can end up in a different location entirely. In addition, cameras give the robots the ability to sense any obstacles that might block their path, allowing the robot to come to a stop and a wait further instructions and report that it has found something unusual on the warehouse floor. Even so, typically humans are not allowed to roam the area where the robots pick up shelves if something has fallen on the warehouse floor. A designated troubleshooter gets an alert, and that person must use an interface to draw the path that they are going to take from the entrance of the cage all the way to the point of trouble. Like let's say that a product has fallen out of a shelf and has hit the floor, and a robot has reported it. You would use a tablet. If you're the troubleshooter, you'd use a tablet and you would draw, almost like a maze, the path you would take to get to that particular item, and you would follow that path out and back. In addition, you'd wear a radio transmitter that would send a signal out that the robots could all detect, and that would alert the robots to the presence of you, the troubleshooter. That helps prevent a situation in which the robots are going to collide with you, right, you want to avoid that. Now, there's a lot of work that goes into designing robots that can interoperate in a space that's occupied by humans, and it's a very challenging line of technology because it takes more than just thinking about how the machines work you also have to think about how people work, and moreover, you have to think about how people change the way they work when they're in the company of a robot. It's kind of similar to the concept in quantum theory, right, the idea that you change a thing you observe just through the act of observation. Well, you can have a workspace that humans had only been working in for a while, and you could say, all right, well, I've observed how the humans work, and I'm going to build a robot that does this one task that the humans do, and I'm just going to incorporate right into their workspace. But then you find out that when you do that, the humans all behave in a new way because there's a new thing in the environment that you didn't account for, and now the design of your robot doesn't work as well. We humans are tricky like that. Moreover, we need to get to that threat that weavers were worried about more than a century ago. Is automation going to take our jobs? Now? There have been a few studies, all using different methodologies, and some of those studies coming under criticism for the approaches that were used. But there have been a few studies that suggest we'll see automation continue to impact jobs in the near future and drastically so over the course of the long run. The interpretation of those results have been reported in ways that range from automation is going to be disruptive that's on the light end to fifty percent of all jobs are going to be taken by the robots. So what's the actual truth. Well, the truth, as it turns out, is complex. For one thing, automation rarely takes over an entire job. What is far more likely to happen is that automation will take over certain tasks that are part of a job, or perhaps multiple jobs. So if a job requires a wide variety of tasks, some of which may require critical thinking, it's really hard to design a robot that can do all of that. It's far more likely that you would automate certain job responsibilities, which would mean that those jobs themselves wouldn't go away, they would just change. The repetitive responsibilities would be offloaded, and you would focus on something else. You might have to spend more time doing other duties rather than the routine ones, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there are cases where automation would likely take over an entire job, for example, truck drivers in shipping trucks. Much of the work in autonomous vehicles is really focusing not necessarily on replacing passenger vehicles so much as commercial vehicles like shipping trucks. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States estimated that the age of the average US truck driver is fifty five and more than ninety percent of all truck drivers in the US are mail and that will present a challenge see Generally, the pro argument for automation is that while robots and automated systems will eliminate some jobs, they will create other jobs, presumably better jobs. And this is true. At the turn of the twentieth century, forty percent of all jobs in the United States were on farms. So that means four out of ten people in the US who had a job we're working on a farm. Today, Agriculture and all the related food sectors make up just eleven percent of all jobs in the United States. And if we just limit this to the people who are working on farms, you know, not all agricultural jobs and food sector jobs, just the farm jobs. If we do that, we're talking about only one point three percent of all US employment, So going from forty percent to one point three percent, that's a drastic change. Now, clearly automation has transformed agriculture. It allows us to do a lot more while relying on fewer people, and new jobs did come around, so we didn't see an unemployment rate reaching levels higher than forty percent pre COVID. The pro automation argument states that new jobs, which again should ideally be better than existing jobs, as in less strenuous and less dangerous and more interesting, will emerge as older jobs are phased out. Now that works fine on a macro scale when you're taking a really big picture look at the overall trends, but when you consider the particulars, like our truck drivers, you start to see some obstacles. See this year, I turned forty five, so I'm a lot closer to the average age of a truck driver in the United States than I am to someone who's just getting into the job market for the first time. And I can tell you that even as a relatively tech savvy guy, I would find it really challenging to pick up the job skills. I would need to go into a different line of work, particularly one where I'm competing against people who already have training and experience in that field. So imagine having to tell a group of fifty five year old truck drivers that they're out of a job. But good news, if you just start taking classes, you can learn to code and make less money than you did in your old job. It's not great, is what I'm saying. That being said, automation is clearly not going anywhere. It's going to continue to play a big role in how we get work done, and in our best case scenarios, it's going to augment the work that humans do, leading to better, more efficient, and more cost effective outcomes. It will free us up to focus on the parts of our jobs that we find the most fulfilling. We can handle the stuff that requires flexibility and intuitive thinking, and the machines can handle the routine and the dangerous. But in a worst case scenario, we'll see an unprepared population of former workers who are now out of a job and without the support system there to help them transition into something new so that they can continue to contribute to society and earn a living. Now, this is why you will often hear conversations about automation get tied into concepts like a guaranteed jobs program. This is typically where something like a government creates a system that makes certain every person who wants a job can get a job. Or you'll hear about guaranteed basic income. This is a strategy in which tax dollars go to fund a standard income payout to all citizens so that they can meet their most basic needs. Now, these are big ideas, they aren't easy to implement or administer, and they're not cheap, But it may be that they will become necessary or some similar strategy will be needed to make certain that we have a plan to move toward rather than being caught in a world where a disproportionate percentage of people can't find gainful employment. Heck, we're seeing something like that right now due to the COVID crisis, which is also underlining the importance of automation in a world where it's not necessarily safe to have a bunch of human beings all gathered in the same place at the same time. Robots coming for our jobs, well, for some of our jobs, definitely, many of those jobs come with some pretty tough consequences for humans who are working those jobs today. Those jobs may have high injury rates, the people who work them may have lower life expectancies, and they are a whole host of health issues that can come along with certain jobs. So you could make a strong argument that really this is for the best because it will help save lives and reduce the chance for injury or illness for a lot of people. But for other jobs, the robots aren't likely to take over in the near future. For a lot of jobs, automated systems, not necessarily robots, but perhaps software based AI, will augment what humans are doing. It's important we have conversations about this stuff and to talk about how to address the consequences of increased automation. There are ways we can enjoy the benefits of automation, but only if we think critics about it and create policies and procedures accordingly. Now I gotta get going. I hear robo Jonathan is going to host the next episode of Tech Stuff, and I have to train them on how to make puns and pop culture references. I hope you liked that episode from twenty twenty. As I said, We've got a lot more to talk about these days because of things like generative AI and the concern that that could impact jobs that for a long time people assumed we're safe from automation, especially from things like robotics, you know, white collar jobs that people just thought were kind of the domain of humans, And now there's a real question as to whether or not that's actually the case. So I think it's even more prevalent. And again seeing the labor movement in the tech sector in particular over the last few years tells us that there's some very important issues still at the very heart of technology and the way we do business that relate back to the foundations of the labor movement here in America. So I hope you enjoyed that episode. For those of you in the United States, I hope you're having a healthy and safe and fun Labor Day. For everyone else, I hope you're having a great Monday, you know. I hope your day is fantastic too, And I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.