The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  The anti-tech rebellion has already started, and it goes far beyond the taxi drivers who have burned Uber cars in foreign capitals. More than 50,000 hotel and casino workers from the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union voted in 2018 to go on strike, stating among other things that their jobs were being threatened by robots. “I voted yes to go on strike to ensure my job isn’t outsourced to a robot. We know technology is coming, but workers shouldn’t be pushed out and left behind,” said Chad Neanover, a cook at the Margaritaville Hotel. Las Vegas’s Culinary Workers Union secretary treasurer Geoconda Argüello-Kline said, “We support innovations that improve jobs, but we oppose automation when it only destroys jobs. Our industry must innovate without losing the human touch.”

  When I asked the union’s spokeswoman, Bethany Khan, whether they were demanding a ban on robots, she responded that “we don’t oppose technology, but we want to have a say in how technology is implemented in our workforce.” Among other things, the union was demanding that people displaced by technology be retrained “so that workers have the opportunity to grow with technology, versus being laid off,” she said.

  The Las Vegas labor union members had good reasons to worry. At the Tipsy Robot bar within the Planet Hollywood casino, two robots were already making and serving cocktails. The bar’s web page said its robots “have the capacity to produce 120 drinks per hour….Our mechanical marvels use exact measurements, ensuring a perfectly crafted sip every time. They have killer dance moves, too.” At the nearby Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas Hotel, a four-foot-tall Pepper robotic concierge had recently started offering assistance with hotel services and directions. Meanwhile, the Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel had started using two delivery robots to take food and drinks to the guests’ rooms. A University of Redlands study in 2017 predicted that 65.2 percent of the jobs in Las Vegas—including servers, kitchen workers, cooks, and bartenders—risked being eliminated by automation within ten or twenty years.

  On a larger scale, there has been a growing public reaction against big-tech companies following the Facebook scandal over reports that the Trump campaign–linked data firm Cambridge Analytica had inappropriately obtained private information of more than 50 million of the social network’s users. More than 552 million people made Google searches under the words “delete Facebook” in the aftermath. While most of them probably didn’t pull out from Facebook, many—including celebrities such as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and singer/actress Cher—did so. The European Union passed rules to protect privacy on the Internet. And an entire country, Papua New Guinea, announced it would unplug Facebook for one month to look into ways to eradicate fake news and pornography. The government wanted to make sure that “real people with real identities” used the network responsibly, the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier reported.

  In addition, many tech companies that until recently were darlings of the media are now under fire for allegedly creating “tech addiction.” There are “tech-detox” retreats across the country where people spend vacations with no access to Wi-Fi and where smartphones and other electronic devices are forbidden. Several television series that portray a skeptical view of big-tech companies, such as Westworld and Black Mirror, have drawn huge audiences. And there are increasingly more newspaper stories casting doubts about the true intentions of big-tech firms, such as an October 13, 2017, article in The New York Times Sunday Review titled “Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend.”

  In Silicon Valley, a group of former executives and technologists from Google, Facebook, and other technology firms have recently launched an initiative called Truth About Tech to fight against tech addiction. They announced they had collected $57 million in cash and donated advertising time to promote their cause. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist who is one of the group’s leaders, told me that big-tech firms intentionally try to keep us glued to their platforms for as long as they can because their stock valuation depends on viewers’ engagement time, the time we spend in front of our screens. Netflix, which previously asked you to press the yes button if you wanted to see the next episode of a TV series, now moves on to the next installment automatically, without asking for your permission. Twitter, likewise, uses casino gambling techniques to keep you hooked, he said.

  “The people who designed Twitter made it so that when you pull down to refresh, it’s like playing with a slot machine. There is a variable reward, because sometimes you have new tweets and sometimes you don’t. And that makes it intrinsically addictive,” Harris told me. Tech addiction is causing isolation, attention deficit problems, and depression among young people, and causing adults to sleep less, he added, citing several studies. Besides educating the public, Truth About Tech and other advocacy groups are demanding that big-tech companies and the government fund studies to look into the impact of tech addiction on youngsters.

  EVENTUALLY, AUTOMATION WILL MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

  But in the long term, two or three decades out, many of today’s big-tech excesses are likely to be under control, and automation is likely to increase productivity and allow countries to pay a universal basic income to all their citizens, perhaps in return for community service. People will live better, much like what happened after the initial traumas of the Industrial Revolution and the agricultural revolution before it. After a transition that may result in massive job losses and anti-robotization protests, we may see a re-accommodation of the workforce, with more people doing better and safer jobs. In the United States, as we saw earlier in this book, the percentage of people working in agriculture fell from 60 percent of the population in the mid-nineteenth century to just 2 percent today. Similarly, the percentage of people working in the manufacturing sector fell from 26 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2017. And yet the standard of living is much better today than it was when most Americans were working in the fields or in factories.

  The same thing happened in China and India, where hundreds of millions of people climbed out of poverty thanks to the economic modernization that began in the late twentieth century. Greater productivity resulting from automation will also allow people to work fewer hours, as has been the trend for centuries now, and in less boring and repetitive tasks. This greater amount of leisure time will allow us to rediscover the lost arts of conversation, reading, and good music, and hopelessness will give way to new and previously unimagined possibilities.

  I’m not ending this book on an optimistic note to be politically correct, but because I’m convinced that in the long term, the world will be a better place. Of course there will be ups and downs, as there have always been. Terrible wars will occur, and there will be horrendous natural disasters produced by global warming, but the general trend over time will be positive. We are likely to see a continuation of the overall progress that humankind has been making since the time when we were living in caves. Just take a look at the amazing achievements of the past two hundred years:

  Life expectancy: The average life expectancy has risen from only thirty years in ancient times to nearly seventy years today and has increased at an exponentially rapid pace over the past two centuries. As Oxford University economist Max Roser reminds us, even in low-income countries, people are living longer than ever. And this increase isn’t due solely to a dramatic reduction in infant mortality rates. If we just take into account children who reach the age of five, average life expectancy has gone up from fifty-five years in 1841 to eighty-two years nowadays. By the same token, a generation ago, a fifty-year-old person could expect to live another twenty years, whereas today that person can be expected to live another thirty-three years. We have managed to either limit or eradicate several diseases that devastated entire populations two hundred years ago, like polio, smallpox, and measles, and we are making great strides in combating many other illnesses.

  Poverty: The percentage of the world population living in absolute poverty has fallen
from 84 percent in 1820 to 10 percent nowadays. Famines, which were common in the time of our great-grandparents, are now rare. Today, obesity is a bigger killer than famine. In 2010, obesity killed roughly 3 million people worldwide, whereas famines and malnutrition together claimed the lives of about a million people. As Oxford’s Roser says, technology is helping even the poorest among us. Nathan Rothschild, the wealthiest man in the world at the time of his death in 1836, died from an infection that can now be easily treated with an antibiotic that costs pennies and is available in just about every hospital on the planet.

  Infant mortality: It wasn’t very long ago that mothers used to lose one or more children. In 1820, 43 percent of children died before reaching the age of five. In eighteenth-century Sweden, every third child died before turning five, and in nineteenth-century Germany, the infant mortality rate was one in two. Today, in developed nations, the rate is less than one in a hundred, and in emerging countries, it has fallen to 1.07 percent in China, 1.2 percent in Argentina, 1.3 percent in Mexico, 4 percent in South Africa, and 4.7 percent in India. There are only a few nations, such as Angola, where the rate hasn’t yet fallen below 15 percent.

  Education: Whereas only 12 percent of the world’s population knew how to read in 1820, that figure has now risen to 85 percent. In the United States and most European nations, 99 percent of children can read and write, and literacy rates have reached 98 percent in Argentina, 95 percent in China, 94 percent in Mexico, 90 percent in Brazil, and 63 percent in India. There are only a few nations in sub-Saharan Africa where the literacy rate continues to hover at around 30 percent.

  Freedom: Despite big bumps on the road, such as World War II and the recent rise of authoritarian populism across the globe, there are more people around the world today who enjoy basic freedoms than ever before. The wave of decolonization in the nineteenth century and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989 contributed to the birth of many democratic nations. While there was just one democracy in the entire world in 1811, today there are eighty-seven. Freedom House, the U.S. watchdog organization, reported in 2017 a global reduction in basic civil liberties for the eleventh straight year, but the trend over the past two centuries has been clearly positive. According to the organization’s ranking of 195 nations, 87 can currently be considered “free,” or 45 percent of the total, while 59 are classified as “partially free” and 49 are listed as “not free.”

  Wars: Contrary to what we might believe if we rely only on the news of the day, there are fewer wars in the world. In ancient times, human-caused violence accounted for 15 percent of all deaths in the world. During the twentieth century, that figure had fallen to 5 percent, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century that figure stands at less than 1 percent. In 2012, about 620,000 people died from acts of violence across the globe, but the vast majority of them were victims of murders. Only 120,000 of the total number of violent deaths were due to armed conflicts. Comparatively, 1.5 million people died from diabetes. As Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has put it, “sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”

  Quality of life: Medical advances have allowed us to make great progress in alleviating, if not eliminating, pain. Can you imagine what it must have been like to go to the dentist and have a tooth pulled before anesthesia was invented? Painkillers as we know them today have been around only since the mid-nineteenth century. Until just a few decades ago, going to the dentist was torture. Today, while it’s not exactly something we look forward to doing, we often don’t even feel the sting that numbs our mouth, because the dentist uses a local anesthetic at the site of the injection. Aspirin, the most common painkiller today, didn’t exist before 1899. People often had to suffer chronic pain throughout their lives from things that today are easily treated with an aspirin. And air conditioning, which has become so essential to those living in hot climates, was invented only in the early twentieth century. Would you want to go back to a time where there was no anesthesia, no aspirin, and no air conditioning?

  Many of those who say the world is going from bad to worse are forgetting other key facts, such as that slavery was a common practice in the United States and many other countries until the mid-nineteenth century. Or that half the world’s population—women—were considered second-class citizens until relatively recently, though they still are denied basic rights in some parts of the world. Most women today are living better not only because they have been able to assert their rights, but also because of technology. In the 1920s, many people—especially women—spent nearly twelve hours a week washing clothes. But with the invention of washers and dryers, that has fallen to less than two hours per week. This might seem trivial, but it’s not. Washing machines and microwave ovens have simplified our lives, leaving us with more leisure time to watch TV or do whatever else gives us more satisfaction. Our ancestors never had that luxury.

  Will this positive trend continue in the future? Probably, and most likely we will eventually live even longer and more enjoyable lives. But in the immediate future, things will get rocky. While we make the transition into an increasingly automated world, we will have to adapt, update, and reinvent ourselves, and look for new opportunities in what will be a constantly evolving and sometimes chaotic workplace. Until automation brings about enough prosperity to provide a basic income for everyone who is left behind, or we find other ways to take care of technological unemployment, our motto may just have to be Watch out…the robots are coming!

  EPILOGUE

  THE TOP TEN JOB FIELDS OF THE FUTURE

  When young people ask me for career advice and I tell them to study whatever they like most, I speak from my own experience. When I was a teenager trying to find my place in the world, I knew that I wanted to be a journalist. I was aware that it wasn’t a well-paying profession then—and it’s become even less lucrative nowadays—but it was my passion. When I was thirteen, I started writing imaginary travel books in notebooks, inspired by National Geographic magazine, which we used to get at home. My passion for journalism and politics had probably started when I was a child growing up in Argentina and spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s place, which was midway between my parents’ home and my school. She was a widow and was living with a relatively well-known journalist and politician, who at that time was serving in the Argentine National Congress. I went to their house almost every day after school and was fascinated by the books and newspapers piled up everywhere in his home office. And I was awestruck by his lifestyle. He wrote in the mornings, took a nap after lunch, and several times a week he would have visitors for dinners with whom he would have passionate discussions about current events until late into the night. To me, it seemed much more fun than working from nine to five at a bank or in any other business.

  I was just fifteen years old when my father died, and I felt at the time that I would never overcome the grief. I sought refuge in the world of books and became a somewhat withdrawn, introverted teenager. Years later, without knowing what career path to follow—no major university in Argentina had a journalism program at the time—I studied law and took an internship at a current affairs magazine. When I turned twenty-three, I told my mother I wanted to be a journalist. She reacted with obvious concern. “What will you live on?” she asked. She reminded me that journalism was one of the worst-paying jobs around. She wanted me to enter the family business—a medium-size factory that produced chocolate and other raw materials for bakeries—hoping that one day I would become a top executive at the firm. I refused to follow her advice. And when I look back in time, it was one of the smartest decisions I ever made. I decided to go with my passion.

  If you are a young person and fortunate enough to have found a passion in life, pursue it. Whatever you do, if you enjoy it, you’ll be more motivated and committed to doing it well. When I left Argentina in 1976 and two years later graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I found myself un
employed in a country that wasn’t my own. On top of that, I had an accent that identified me as an immigrant. But I never entertained the notion of doing anything other than journalism. I decided I needed to get into a media company, no matter how, and work my way up to a job in journalism. So I got a job as an English-to-Spanish translator working the night shift at the Associated Press news agency’s headquarters in New York.

  It was a tough job—the shift was from midnight to eight A.M., and I sometimes had to pull two or three shifts in a row—and it was well beneath the qualifications of someone who had just graduated from one of the best journalism schools in the world and already had a thick folder of published articles. But it was the only job I could get. I worked as a night-shift translator at the AP for three years before I was finally able to get transferred to the day shift. There I started to have direct contact with my bosses, whom I had hardly met, and let them know about my desire to become a reporter. Eventually they started sending me out to cover routine events when the regular reporter was on vacation or out sick. Little by little, I went from being an occasional substitute to a regular one, and that opened my way to starting a career as a journalist in the United States.