Robots, class war fears, and Homer Simpson

A recent post by @calaber24p suggests that the mass automation movement will transform the world, and may combine with increasing socioeconomic inequality to bring about a class war. This prospect seems reasonable, which is part of what makes it so scary. Here, I suggest that something a bit more hopeful (and less clear-cut) than a class war will result from these circumstances. 

To use the example of the US, if 'jobs' are defined as secure employment situations that pay wages sufficient to cover the entire cost of living, and if this Oxford study is correct, our situation looks approximately like this: 

But this is not the whole story. At the beginning of the 21st century, a billion people were unable to obtain adequate food with the money accessible to them. The jobs, and thus the incomes, of half of the planet's workers were informal, and therefore unprotected in any legal sense. Attempts to apply political solutions to this problem - ranging from petitions to public demonstrations to outright revolutions - have not reduced inequality. Meanwhile, the total context in which human life evolved has been quickly transformed by technology into something unprecedented. Decision making procedures at all levels have so far proven fundamentally unable to adequately respond to the new circumstances. 

As traditional inequities morph into networked quagmires of crisis, and as our instincts begin misfiring on a massive scale due to the mismatch between the ecologies our bodies evolved to exist within and the environs we now inhabit, profoundly sophisticated psychosocial forces seem to be building in response to these challenges. Some of these will surely be marshaled in service of conflict. The rise of ISIS is proof enough of that. But I do not imagine that actually doing the kind of class war that brought down the empires of yesteryear will seem too appealing to most people when the brutal realities of violent mayhem can so easily be captured and shared electronically. And I do believe that the power of automation to free up our precious time will prove more seductive than any argument against the use of such technologies.

Which brings me to Homer Simpson.

Once upon a time, Homer discovered that he could automate his job at the nuclear power plant by correctly positioning a toy bird in front of his work computer.

Homer did not exactly think things through. It was enough for him to know that this toy bird would do his job for him while he drank beer in a hammock. Sure his laziness was frowned upon, and ultimately led to disaster when his automation technology produced an unanticipated outcome. But once he became aware that this tech would make his everyday life easier, Homer just went for it.

We are doing a similar thing on a global scale at present. We are just going for it. I do think that the automation technologies now emerging will significantly impact most peoples' lives. It seems quite likely that the total economic system will change drastically, and in a relatively small time frame. A bunch of increasingly weird stuff will probably happen as people try to navigate this transition, and there is bound to be some serious civil unrest. But, try as I might, I just can not picture any kind of real war happening on a mass scale (in the US, at any rate) along class lines.

Instead, when increasing inequality meets emerging automation tech, I suspect that what will shake out is a huge variety of things, happening all at once, that will be impossible to make any sense of. Hopefully, they will at least be a little bit funnier than a class war would be.