White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Robots Are Coming — Sooner Than You Think

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The next big thing is robots. They are, you might say, on the move.

Within five years, robots will be doing a lot of things that people now do. Simple repetitive work, for example, is doomed.

Already, robots weld, bolt and paint cars and trucks. The factory of the future will have very few human workers. Amazon distribution centers are almost entirely robot domains. Robots search the shelves, grab items, pack and send them to you — often seconds after you have placed your order.

Of course, these orders will be delivered in vans, which must be loaded carefully, even scientifically. The first out must be the last in; small items must nestle with large ones. Space is at a premium, so robotic brains will do the sorting and packing swiftly, efficiently and inexpensively.

Very soon, the van will be self-driving: a robot capable of navigating the traffic and finding your home. At first, it may not get further in the delivery chain than calling you to say that your package has arrived. Eventually, humanoid robots may ride in the vans and, yes, hand your package to you. No tipping, please.

When we think about robots, we tend to think of the robots that look like us. The internet is full of clips of them climbing stairs, playing sports and doing backflips.

There are reasons for humanoid robots: They are less intimidating with their humanlike heads, two arms with hands and two legs with feet than a machine with many arms or legs. Also, most of the tasks the robot is taking over are done by humans. The tasks are fitted to people, such as pumping gas, preparing vegetables or painting a wall.

The first big incursion may be robotaxis. Waymo taxis are already operating in five cities, and the company has plans to roll them out in 19 cities. Several cities are concerned about safety, including Houston and Seattle, and want to ban them. But there are state-city jurisdictional issues about implementing bans.

A likely scenario, as with other bans, is that the development will go elsewhere. Travelers tend to eschew places where Uber and Lyft aren’t allowed to operate in favor of those where they are.

You are already dealing with robots when you talk to a digital assistant at an airline, a bank, a credit card or insurance company, or any business where you call a helpline. That soothing, friendly voice that comes on immediately and asks practical questions may be a robot: the unseen voice of artificial intelligence.

In the years I have been writing about AI and its impact on society, I have consistently heard the AI revolution and its impact on jobs compared with the Industrial Revolution and automation. The one led to the other and in the end, many new jobs and whole new ecosystems flourished.

It isn’t clear that this will happen again and if so on what timetable. A lot of jobs are already in danger, from file clerks to delivery and taxi drivers, from warehouse workers to longshoremen.

AI is also changing the tech world. A whole new tier of companies is emerging to carry forward the AI-robot revolution. These are companies that make robots; companies that write software, which will give robots brainpower; and companies that will have a workforce that maintains robots.

These emerging companies will need a workforce with a different set of skills — skills that will keep the new AI economy humming.

What is missing is any sense that the political class has grasped the tsunami of change that is about to break over the nation. In just a few years, you may be riding in a robotaxi, watching a humanoid robot doing yard work or lying on a couch and chatting with your robot psychiatrist.

Our species is adaptable, and we have adapted everything from the wheel to the steam engine to electricity to the internet. And we have prospered.

Time to think about how to prosper with AI and its robots.

Life at the Bottom: the Real Minimum Wage Saga

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I once earned the minimum wage not because I needed an entry-level job, but because I needed the money. It was a minimum-wage job or a begging bowl and the street.
 
While I learned some interesting – and some disagreeable — things about life at the bottom, I never met anyone who was there because they were entering the workforce. Instead they were a community of the hapless; some of them on their way down, but more of them just on their way to nowhere.
 
Each day, they were hired through Manpower and were sent where they were needed, if there was work that day. The hiring hall was not a place of despair but of resignation. If you were considered a good worker you would get a semi-permanent assignment. But as with most temp work, employers were prohibited from offering you a permanent job.
 
It was the winter of 1965, and the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour. By the time deductions were taken, take-home pay was about $1 an hour, which was not enough to support a family, or even to think of little things like vacations or getting one's teeth fixed.
 
Teeth stand out in my memory for two reasons. First, because my co-workers had visibly terrible teeth. Second because I once bussed a table at the Horn & Hardart automat on 42nd Street in New York, and a customer had put her false teeth on a dirty plate and I had whisked it away.
 
About an hour later – people who ate at the automat ate there because you could sit for an hour without being bothered — she discovered her loss. The most awful crying and begging resulted. Over and over, she cried, “I'll never have teeth again. I can't afford new teeth.”
 
I went to the manager, who showed me dumpsters piled high with that day's garbage. He was a decent man and we tried to find the woman's teeth. It was hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Her teeth were irretrievably lost and she went out into the night shrieking. She would never have teeth again.
 
I got back into newspapering and moved on and up. Over the decades, though, I have retained an affinity for those who draw the minimum wage, and a certain knowledge that it needs to be higher and linked to the cost of living.
 
Even so, I think the minimum wage is a two-edged sword. I think in times of near full employment, employers use it to hold down what they otherwise would have to pay. But I also think that without it, there would be terrible exploitation at the bottom – sweatshops and the like.
 
I think the minimum wage is part of the social network where those who have not yet risen and those who have fallen in life can find precarious purchase.
 
Sadly the minimum-wage job is under threat not because the Obama administration wants to raise it to $10.10, but because of the computerization of the workplace. Simply, people will be replaced with computer-driven devices no matter what the minimum wage is.
 
A great gale of change is sweeping through the workplace. We get our money from machines; increasingly, we check ourselves out of the supermarket and the drugstore; we buy our airline and train tickets online.
 
The low-wage job as well as some better ones are going. Fast-food restaurants have introduced computerized ordering. Inexorably, business is committed to replacing workers with automation. That is not new.
 
What is new is that all the jobs in the service industries, which were considered exempt from automation, are now going the way of the coal miner, the stevedore, and more than half the people it used to take to make a car or a steel beam.
 
We are having the wrong discussion over the minimum wage. We need to talk about work; all work, including work for those at the bottom — those who cannot even think about dental work, vacations or college.
 
Raising the minimum wage will not drive employers to replace workers with machines. That has already reached flood stage. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate