Imaginary Worlds - Robot Collar Jobs

Episode Date: November 30, 2017

Are we prepared for a future where robots are the most sought after employees? Maybe not. Lawmakers will blame anything but automation for job losses and flat wages -- but sci-fi writers are up to the challenge. In her debut novel Autonomous, Annalee Newitz imagines humans taking designer drugs to try and compete with A.I. for jobs. Lee Konstantinou writes about the last worker at a pit stop for self-driving trucks. And the authors of The Expanse depict a future where under-employed Earthers leave for a rugged life in space. Also featuring Arizona State University professor Ed Finn, and Erik Bergmann lending his voice for dramatic readings.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Meet Amazon's newest holiday workers, the Kiva robots. In the last few months, the media has come to realize something that economists have been saying for a while. Automation is the real culprit for job losses and flat wages. Not globalization and certainly not immigration. So far, there are nine robots here doing the work of more than 250 humans. And is your job, my job, at risk?

In fact, besides working on this podcast, I also work for the New Yorker Radio Hour, where I help New Yorker staff writers adapt their print pieces to radio. And I've been spending the last few months working on a story about how automation is about to take a huge leap forward, which means a whole sector of jobs, from warehouse workers to truck drivers, could be wiped out. And it's not just blue-collar jobs. A lot of white-collar jobs are being replaced with algorithms or some other kind of artificial intelligence. jobs or being replaced with algorithms or some other kind of artificial intelligence. And thinking about robots and seeing them up close got me thinking about science fiction, because science fiction has been imagining this future for a long time.

Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. I mean, you got to look at, you know, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano from 1952. Now that the machines have taken over, it's quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something. If someone has brains, said Anita firmly, he can still get to the top.

That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed. She looked at him appraisingly. Brains and nerve, Paul. And blinders. Now that genre didn't really take off because for much of the 20th century, it seemed like the worst case scenario was not coming true. Automation was wiping out some jobs, but it was creating new jobs at the same time.

Jobs that paid better. Jobs that had less physical strain. But now we have reached a turning point. We are manufacturing more products than ever in the U.S. without the need of human beings. And think about all the money that companies save with robots or AI. They never take breaks. They don't complain about heat or air conditioning.

Don't even need to keep the lights on. And forget health insurance. I mean, you could scrap the whole human resources department. Now, I talked with Roy Bahat, who is a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. And he says there is a parlor game that some of his colleagues in Silicon Valley like to play called The Last Job. And basically it's when technology people sit around saying,

well, I don't know, I think The Last Job is going to require empathy. So it's going to be people caring for children or The Last Job is going to require you to have the skill to work with your hands or whatever it is. Now, Roy started feeling a little guilty about all this because his company, Bloomberg Beta, invests in artificial intelligence that is specifically geared towards the future of work. I realized at one point, wait a minute, if we're going to automate all these things, we better have a point of view into what our society is going to look like.

That's why another organization that he works with called the Economic Security Project teamed up with the sci-fi website io9 to sponsor a huge fiction writing contest where they ask writers to imagine the future of work or lack thereof. The only major rule is that the writers have to imagine in their stories universal basic income, or UBI. That's where every American gets a stipend from the government to pay for their basic needs. Now, UBI is kind of a hot term now because a lot of economists and tech moguls have been going around saying this is the future, whether we like it or not. But one of the reasons why that group explored fiction is because we needed kind of the evidence of the imagination to be able to picture how a whole society might fit together, in part because fiction might be the best way we can actually come up with a consistent set of rules

that might work in reality in order to understand what might happen. But there is no, I mean, if your puzzle is, hey, where do I go for the kind of paint the picture of the instruction manual for post-work, what things are going to look like? I don't think we've hit on it yet. The contest is closed now, but the winning story will be published on io9 in January. But there actually is a series of novels

that do explore an idea very similar to this, The Expanse by Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham. The novels take place around 200 years in the future. Automation has led to mass unemployment. Most people on earth get universal basic income, which is a huge political and humanitarian achievement. But a lot of those people still want to have jobs. They still want careers, and some of them just want to make a lot of money. And so, since this is the future, they fly off to Mars in the asteroid belt to live a more rugged, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of life,

mining for raw materials in space. Eventually, the Martian colonies become independent, and they create this Ayn Randian propaganda about how Mars is a nation of makers and Earth is a society of takers. And if Martian propaganda was right, most of the people she could see right now didn't have jobs. In the second book, one of my favorite characters,

a Martian marine named Bobby Draper, questions everything she's heard about the Earth when she comes here for the first time. She tried to imagine that, not having any particular place you had to be on any given day, a world no longer of the haves and have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic. Bobbi wondered if Mars would become like this after the terraforming. If Martians didn't have to fight every day to make enough resources to survive, would they turn into this? The work hours and collective intelligence of 15 billion humans just tossed away as acceptable losses for the system? Ty Frank says that the inspiration for this part of the story came from an article he read on how parents with higher educations and dual incomes tend to have smaller families.

What I took from that is, oh, that's really interesting. What if we're in a future where half the population just doesn't have jobs? What happens to population growth then? What we're sort of positing is that when most of the people don't have jobs, they have kids instead because they have nothing else going on. In other words, he thinks automation could lead to overpopulation, which would make all these problems worse. But that's all backstory for how this world got to be the way it is.

The Expanse is really focused on space exploration, intergalactic politics, contact with an alien civilization, and you're going to hear a lot more from Ty and Daniel in my next episode, which is all about The Expanse, the books, and the TV series, which is currently filming its third season. But going back to automation,

I wanted to know who is really focused on this idea of the future of work, because we're really going into uncharted territory here. So earlier this year, I tackled a similar subject, how science fiction has imagined the Internet and what we can learn from those stories. fiction has imagined the internet and what we can learn from those stories. And once again, I wanted to turn to Ed Finn, who runs the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University. It's interesting because science fiction in so many ways is this tool for escapism, and yet we keep talking about work. And I think that's because work has come to shape us so profoundly. We identify ourselves by what we do. If you think about a truly idyllic utopia where there is nothing, there is no work of any kind, some people might find that horribly boring and awful. That would be a terrible place to live. Actually, utopias fall under his job description. Ed works with science fiction

writers to publish an anthology called Hieroglyph, where the writers are encouraged to imagine worlds that are more constructive than dystopian. So I asked him what was the best story he read about automation. There's a great science fiction story by my friend Lee Constantino that we published. The story is called Johnny Appledrone versus the FAA. Lee Constantino told me that he imagined Johnny Appledrone as a mysterious radical who says he's all for the working man, but gets caught up in his own celebrity and hype. But I needed a narrator. I needed someone to meet him, to be affected by him, to know, learn about him and his cause. And eventually I came up with this idea of this character who becomes an intern of this legendary figure. And that's his main character, Arun.

He's an intern for Johnny Appledrone, who clearly doesn't see the irony in having an unpaid intern. But Arun is also one of the few human beings left working at an automated pit stop called Big Machine. Everything at Big Machine was automatic. Well, almost everything. Occasionally, a hose tangled up. An unusually big rat would die in the bathroom. A trucker would collapse drunk on a snooker table with a mighty thud. Or a stray drone jammed up with bird poop

would drop from the sky. I did what little the robots couldn't, a poorly paid ghost in the machine. Mostly, I was an eyewitness to the end of the age of the truckers. In the beginning, because robot trucks increased total trucking volume, truckers actually got more work. More trucks meant more legally mandated drivers, manning machines in case of trouble. But robo-trucks became more reliable, and corporate lobbyists gathered in Washington. Truckers would eventually have to be sacrificed on the economy's

automating altar. As millions of truckers lose their jobs to self-driving trucks, As millions of truckers lose their jobs to self-driving trucks, the resentment builds until a character named Gallagher drives a truck bomb into the Department of Transportation. The truckers weren't sure how to respond. Everyone hated Gallagher, yes. At the same time, he'd taken action. While they, for all their whining and complaining, sat on their hands,

waiting for the end, the day they'd finally be fired. The sympathetic chatter, cloaked beneath tortured disclaimers, I don't like what he done, but made me sick. So many died at that monster's hands. How could anyone say a kind word, offer a single qualification or explanation for his actions? You can also imagine a kind of ambivalence on the part of those truckers. You know, they don't like what he did. They, in fact, hate what he did. What he does ends up speeding up the automation of the trucking industry, not slowing it down. But it wasn't that hard to imagine that someone might go there. Lee is expanding his short story into a novel where he's going to delve deeply into ideas like universal basic income and how that might play out politically.

OK, maybe a universal basic income is a way of solving the problem of mass and structural unemployment. But what happens to immigrants and refugees? Do you extend this benefit to all people living in the society, or do you only extend it to citizens? Now, that's a pretty realistic near-future scenario. But the other story that Ed recommended was way out there. He is fascinated by the new novel Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. In her future, robots and humans work alongside each other to the point where they start to take on aspects of each other.

I think my single favorite part of the novel is that the robots find ways to have recreational drug-like experiences. They deliberately run bad code that's going to cause them to glitch. And that's kind of like getting high. Yeah, even robots need a break from the monotony of work. Now, I've had Annalee Newitz on my show before because I'm a huge fan of her journalistic work. She's best known for co-creating the website io9. Autonomous is her first novel. And when you're writing journalism, there's a lot of stories that you have to leave out. Like oftentimes an editor will say, like, if you're talking about something that's happening more than five years in the future, that's really not journalism. So I got to hold I held in for years and years and years all these feelings about science and then

just kind of poured them into this book. The initial spark of inspiration happened when she was researching an article about a seismology lab at Berkeley. She was looking at these robotic actuators that were simulating an earthquake by crushing a house. And because I'm a bit of a dork, I kept thinking, oh, you know, actuators are just arms. Like, how does it feel to have an actuator instead of an arm? That moment, I had the image, the sort of first image in the novel where we meet Paladin, the robot character, who is climbing a sand dune and he's getting sand in his actuators and it's causing him pain. And that grew right out of imagining how this industrial application might one day become part of someone's body.

Sand had worked its way under Paladin's carapace and his actuators ached. It was the first training exercise, or maybe the 40th. During the formatting period, it was hard to maintain linear time. Memories sometimes doubled or tripled. Paladin used millions of lines of code to keep his balance as he slid walked up a slope of fine grains molded into ripples by wind. So how do humans compete with artificial intelligence in the future? That is the plot of the novel. Paladin and a human are paired up to find the designer of an illegal drug

called Zakuity, which makes people smarter and more productive at work, sort of like the way people abuse Ritalin or Adderall today. After taking Zakuity, work gave you a kind of visceral satisfaction that nothing else could, which was perfect for a corp like QuickBuild. Completion rewards were so intense that it made you writhe right in your plush desk chair, clutching the foam desktop, breathing hard for a minute or so. It was easy to see why this shit sold like crazy. One of the kind of evil things that I did with the drug's acuity was that I made a drug that was not only making people more productive in the sense that they were kind of speedy and they're

able to get more stuff done, but it also made them feel like getting a work project done was genuinely good and that it felt good to accomplish something or to meet a deadline. If a company could give you a drug that not only made you get your work done fast, but that when you completed that work, you were like, wow, I did something awesome. That would be the perfect worker drug. I have definitely had jobs before where I could have used a little Zakuity. The only problem is the drug kills you in the end. That's why her main character, Paladin,

is trying to shut it down. Now, in working out Paladin's relationship with his human partner, Annalie wanted to avoid the cliche that robots would be inscrutably different from us. She thinks that if we design them, they will be reflections of us, for better or worse? I think what we're really looking at is a future of fragile intelligence,

because all of these machine learning algorithms, we are training them on human data sets, data sets created by people. And the minds that emerge from that are going to be just as flawed and neurotic as human minds. They're going to be full of prejudices. We've already seen multiple scholarly papers at this point showing that algorithms make racist assumptions. And those are prejudices that they learn from humans. And that's, again, because they're working with human data. Now, a few years ago, I did an episode about how robot stories borrow a lot from slavery narratives. And Annalie does deal directly with that issue. She imagines if robots are self-aware,

they are slaves. But the robots are allowed to work towards their freedom, which in this case means they get an autonomy key, which contains all of their memories that were previously owned by the corporation. Now, her main character of Paladin does win his freedom, but he's not sure exactly what that means. Also, for other reasons in the story, he switched genders, so he is now she. She wanted to ask Fang a dozen questions, but settled on one. How long have you been indentured? questions, but settled on one. How long have you been indentured? By way of reply, Fang transmitted a tiny video file, which was nothing more than seven still images arranged in a sequential slideshow. Viewed together, they said, seven years. Viewed separately, they appeared to represent four different bots. Seven years ago, he was a middleweight insect drone used for mapping.

He had become a snake, then a tank, and for the past three years had retained his current mantis shape. Fang's antennas swept lazily towards Paladin. Don't get too attached to that body. Sooner or later,

they'll change it. But here's the twist. If robots in this story are self-aware slaves, then human slavery can be legalized again. Now, a lot of her readers were surprised to see slavery and indentured servitude in her book, at least for humans. But Annalise says they really shouldn't be surprised. I think it's a, unfortunately, very realistic extension of what we're already seeing now. I mean, we certainly have plenty of examples in the modern world of slavery and indentured servitude.

And if you have a form of slavery anywhere in your culture, that it actually never exists in isolation. You can't have slavery in one part of your culture or in one part of your history and expect it not to infect the entire culture. Which brings us back to an idea that I often wrestle with. I'm always so tempted to take sci-fi at face value. Maybe not as a prediction of the future, but a dress rehearsal. Wi-Fi at face value. Maybe not as a prediction of the future, but a dress rehearsal. Annalise says what she loves about science fiction is that it shows us how humans in all eras, past, present, future, are dealing with the same fundamental questions. They just do it in different ways. That's what's kind of cool is if you look at old science fiction and you say, oh, they predicted, you know, the tricorder

predicted the mobile phone. That's because it's an ongoing human fantasy to have a little voice in your pocket giving you information. You know, that's not a new fantasy. You know, we've always had that idea going back to, I don't know, like a voice in a burning bush giving you special information, right? Like that's just sort of the biblical mobile device. I guess you bring a fire with you everywhere. Don't do that. Well, I'm going to make one prediction about the future. I think we're going to see more sci-fi about automation because this issue gets to the question of how you can feel a sense of dignity and purpose in life. And how do we value life when that life is not very highly valued by its own society? And those issues are definitely in the wheelhouse of science fiction.

That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Eric Bergman, who did the readings, Roy Bahat, Ty Frank, and Daniel Abraham, who you'll hear a lot more from them next week, Ed Finn, Lee Constantinou, and Annalee Newitz, who is already preparing for her automated future by talking with bots on Twitter, or at least she thinks they're bots. When you're talking to a bot, you have to remember that you're talking to something that was made by a person. You know, that bot is an extension of a person. And I think that's what we're looking at in the future

if we think about it sort of in a science fictional mode is a world where you can never be sure if you're talking to a person who's a bot or a bot who's a person. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook or interact with my bot, E. Malinsky, on Twitter. It's amazing how much of my personality is in that thing.

My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.