Reimagining Humanity

We just watched an episode of John Oliver the other day, and Oliver took on Amazon and others of that ilk. We buy stuff from Amazon Prime and we were appalled at the way workers are treated.  Apparently Bezos raised their salaries to at least the $15 minimum wage standard, but they otherwise are treated like robots, rather than humans.

And speaking of robots, it turns out that robots do a lot of the work at Amazon. The humans basically work to serve the robots.  But beyond feeling overwhelmed at the terrible working conditions, I began wondering about workers more broadly.  It seems clear to me that most of the remaining Amazon workers, the ones who serve the robots, will soon be replaced by more robots.  Just watching the robotic movement of goods destined for shoppers all over the country (world?) it seemed inevitable that those robots will soon be carrying out most of the work of the humans who currently work there.  The robots mainly now seem to move the goods through the retrieval and packaging stages, with humans intervening at various points.  So, what is all this work about?

Well, Amazon gets an order online from a customer who wants a book. Someone retrieves the order, and then places an order from the Amazon book depository—yes, Amazon already owns the book and it is stored in a warehouse somewhere.  The person who places the order within Amazon has to tell the system that person X wants a copy of The Half Has Never Been Told, and has ordered it on Amazon Prime. That defines the products and the terms—it must be mailed by a certain date/time.  So, someone in the warehouse gets that order and walks to collect the book, stuffs the book into a box with some stuffing, and places the box onto a conveyor headed to a computer station that seals the box, and prints the address and postage. The box then rolls away to its delivery point, where it is placed by a human into some end stage delivery service, enroute to the truck that will carry it via USPS or UPS to its ultimate destination, all within the allotted time.

So, humans intervene whenever it is convenient and Amazon doesn’t yet have a robot to carry out the needed procedure. But soon, I imagine, most of those procedures will be fully automated, and the warehouses, now filled with humans, will become relatively empty of humanity. I can easily imagine warehouses devoid of humans, aside from some oversight technicians and some maintenance technicians. Even robotic systems will require maintenance.

But thousands of manual workers will soon become hundreds of more highly skilled tekkies who exist to keep the robots moving swiftly through their appointed tasks. And then I begin thinking, extrapolating really, to other industries, perhaps to the source of the goods that now move through the Amazon warehouse systems.  Maybe to the printers who now produce the final copies of The Half Has Never Been Told.  And I can envision a system by which a digital file is sent via the Internet to a fully automated printing shop, and the file arrives with a digital order for 500 copies of the book and some instruction as to the type of printing—hard or soft bound, color of cover, etc. And that order enters the computer, which then sends a digital instruction to the printing presses and the bindery, which then literally prints the books, binds them and then separates the final copy into sets of books to be delivered to various end stage customers, like Amazon. Again, no humans intervene, except perhaps to keep the automated wheels turning.

No, no, you object, surely humans will still be required at many stages of this process. And I say, No, humans will not be required.  Over time, we have seen whole industries basically destroyed in this country by cost considerations. The mills of New England first moving to the South—think Kannapolis—because labor costs were cheaper in the South. Then the owners decided that labor costs were actually less expensive in Mexico, then China, until there were no mills left in America, or Mexico. But if cost is really the determinant, then surely robots will eventually win out, and those same mills will soon be moving out of China. Well, they may move from one town in China to another town in China, or they may move back to America. Where will the robots be located—anywhere and everywhere.

Now if this forecast proves true, what then is the future of the labor force—the actual humans on this planet who exist partly to create things for other humans? I am thinking that we may well need to rethink our entire system of education in this country and beyond.

Partly, we have built a system of education that seeks to inform our humans and to help them to become thinking humans—people with some sense of the past and a path to the future.  Partly, though, this educational system is an employment preparatory system, and I do not mean just the trade schools. All of education, including the “higher” system of education exists to equip humans to carry out various kinds of work.  I include here doctors, lawyers, accountants, physicists, teachers, “management” executives.  We already have robotic surgery, where surgical procedures are carried out by robots under the watchful eye of a human surgeon. I cannot but imagine every field being subjected to robotic intervention. Your friendly neighborhood accountant?  Sure, automation would be simple there. All it takes is a set of rules for operating, and then transferring those rules to a computer.

So, although I am sure that we can find various jobs that would be difficult to transfer to robots, the number may well not be very high.  And so what does this mean for humans, and, more specifically, what does this mean for our system of education?  I think we need to reimagine education, and the entire system of what we like to call “WORK”.

Now, I cannot imagine any inquiry being initiated under the Trump Administration, which wants to see coal mining jobs come back into existence, with folks still equipped with picks and shovels, dragging coal out of underground caverns. But surely, later, perhaps after Trump is dead, and new thinking humans have taken over the government, that inquiries will be initiated throughout the land. The inquiries will be needed, first into the more obvious robotic-friendly industries. But then we will need in-depth examinations of one field of study after another, until we have examined our entire system of education and employment-based training.  

Where will this lead? We cannot know at this stage, since our minds remain firmly embedded in the manual labor mode of thinking. But the inquiries may well free us from the stone age of work and open up a new view of why humans exist and what we should be doing while we are here. I see this as an uplifting atmosphere in which all humans everywhere become re-engaged in the subject of why humans exist, and I do not mean a rebirth of organized religion. We need to think beyond religion and fairy tales. 

We need to re-imagine humanity.