Just now about 40 protesters invaded the Google campus, wearing purple union shirts and handing out flyers explaining that the janitors of Silicon Valley feel that they are compensated insufficiently for services such as wiping down counters and moving trash from small receptacles to larger ones. They made a couple of mistakes in planning. First, Google has, like, security. And video cameras. Blocking the main stairwell wasn’t smart, because the cops showed up pretty quick to herd them onto the streets and away from innocent workers just trying to get to lunch. The big mistake, though, was that they showed up on Family Day. It wasn’t enough to show up and chant loudly, angrily, and aggresively. They had to scare a bunch of visiting children who were just hoping to see how nice mommy and daddy’s office was. Way to go, geniuses. After all, the best way to win new supporters is to freak people’s kids out.
It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for the lower classes. Unskilled laborers should have cause for concern. They still have the highest birth rate, the lowest per capita income, and don’t frequently take advantage of opportunities to gain education or marketable skills. This is usually due to lack of awareness and understanding than outright laziness, but the effect is the same either way. Although I do have to wonder sometimes why someone would look at their paycheck, realize “hey, I don’t make very much money” and think that the answer is to demand more money for scrubbing toilets rather than look at options for training for a better position.
The trouble for people like the noisy protesters on the streets of Mountain View today is that unskilled laborers will only become increasingly irrelevant as time goes on, making their economic and social position ever more precarious. The Industrial Revolution made massive numbers of farm workers and cottage industry laborers obsolete. Since that time, technology has accelerated exponentially. Cooks and maids have been replaced with microwaves and vacuum cleaners. For now, humans are still required to operate modern machinery of convenience. But very soon this will no longer be the case. We already have simple robots that clean floors. They’re still pretty stupid when it comes to being able to clean the floor thoroughly and make it back to their base, but a time will come when a robot will be able to hunt down a microspore of pet dander on the carpet as easily as humans can see a red wine stain on a white tablecloth.
The world of automatons envisioned in 1950’s science fiction is now only a hair from reality. While the possibility of true AI is still questionable, mindless manual labor will vanish from the human skill set in just a few more years. What will we do with the uneducated when they become unusable within the larger economic machinery of our culture? One day there will be toilets that do not require cleaning because they’re made of a material that nothing– not even bacteria– can stick to. One day robot drones will keep floors sparkling clean with no human error, and trash will be automatically disposed of, without the need for humans to contaminate themselves by touching it.
It sounds like a Malthusian nightmare, but without an acceleration of the already existing trend for lower birth rates among the poor or some kind of educational revolution among the economically uncompetitive ranks, we may very well end up with an underclass of outcasts who are not only unskilled– they will be irrelevant.
on Apr 25th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I wonder at what point it becomes more economical for us to enhance the welfare system to provide an actual full living for people with no marketable skills. If all physical labor is done by machines, society doesn’t need them to do anything except keep the species alive.
Of course, they could all become artists. Then they can contribute to society by enhancing the culture, but they aren’t part of the core functionality. (Well, arguably entertainment and culture are core functionality… but I imagine a robot wouldn’t agree with that conjecture.)
(At any rate, why does this vaguely feel like something out of 1984…)
on Apr 25th, 2008 at 9:48 am
TOTALLY, Mark. Orwell’s as relevant as ever.
Sadly, I don’t really see the squeeze getting any better. There will always be jobs for the unskilled, but the number of jobs will shrink rapidly, depressing wages as long as there’s an abundant labor source. It will get harder and harder to find work as the pay gets lower and lower.