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What of the human work force? A long-standing fear of technology is that it will replace humans in performing necessary tasks. Although such fears have increased since the Industrial Revolution and the development of "automation," they go back to fears that scribes would lose their jobs as a result of the printing press, and still earlier. As a result, it is easy to see why technology designed to duplicate human intelligence and human functionality at every level would be considered threatening to a human work force. It is precisely this fear that is played on in R.U.R. One of the reasons that the robots are able to so easily revolt and take over is that since robots have taken over all real work from humans, humans have become bored and stopped working or even reproducing, given nothing to do and therefore no goals to achieve, no reason to continue humanity. The counterargument to this is expressed by Forester and Morrison as an anecdote: A union leader looking over a quarry site bemoans the fate of his workers. He approaches the quarry owner and says, "If it wasn't for those steam shovels, we'd be employing 500 men with shovels." The owner replies, "And if it wasn't for your 500 men with shovels, we'd be employing 10,000 men with thimbles."There are two messages to be taken from this anecdote. The first is that work can be dangerous, dirty, and degrading, or even just "mind-numbingly boring," to quote Eric Roberts, Stanford professor of computer science, on some undesirable jobs in the field of information technology. The second is that technology, inevitably, changes the nature of work rather than eliminating it. Although certain jobs may be eliminated, new jobs spring up to take their place. It is clear that for this process to be a productive one, the potential for AI to eliminate jobs must be mediated by training programs and government policies which can enable the work force to move into a newly computer-dependent environment. |
