Some Reflections on Robots

Means are often confused with ends. Thus, when we focus on the employment-unemployment pic­ture, as I do in this essay, the tendency is to overlook the fact that job holding by itself is, as a rule, but a means to the satisfac­tion of wants. The growth of any individual’s physical and mental faculties does, of course, demand exercise, but having a "job" isn’t always necessary for that; these faculties can be and often are more exercised by the jobless —coupon clippers, for instance —than by job holders.

So, we’re not seeking employ­ment merely for the exercise. Hu­man labor for its own sake is sel­dom our aim; we labor in order to enjoy its fruits in the form of food, clothing, and shelter, or to satisfy other physical and spir­itual hungers. And one of the most essential qualities of being human is the urge to be relieved of burdensome effort and freed to pursue more desirable objectives. It is this urge, when men are free, that causes the invention of me­chanical slaves — our tools and machines; they free us for some­thing hopefully better. This is al­so why we specialize and trade.

In a world which has an infinite amount of work to be done, in­voluntary unemployment is incon­ceivable — provided the market is free. Unemployment is always the result of price (wage) and other coercive controls. Automation, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Our mechanical slaves — labor­saving devices of all kinds — stem from the recognition and pursuit of higher wants than mere sur­vival; they are the means toward such ends. Let us therefore try to clear away some of the confusion that attends the employment-un­employment problem as related to automation.

Whenever we come into posses­sion of a source of mechanical energy equivalent to one man’s energy, we have added to the work force a mechanical slave, an au­tomaton, a robot.

No question about it, the robots, at first blush, appear to cause un­employment. Take the automobile, for instance. It disemployed buggy and wagon workers, whip and harness makers, stable hands, and a host of others. True, some went to work for the auto makers but, nonetheless, the automobile — auto­mated travel, the product of au­tomation — made for unemploy­ment. So goes the chant.

The Facts Deny the Theory

Regardless of that first impres­sion, we know that robots do not, in fact, cause unemployment. For instance, we have experienced an enormous outburst of automation, yet a high percentage of the popu­lation — about 80,000,000 — is on the work force; today’s many areas of acute labor shortage re­fute the notion that automation causes unemployment.

Quite possibly we could settle the whole question in our own minds by merely reflecting on primitive automation: the wheel and a domesticated animal. The ox-drawn cart, instead of putting the owner out of work, gave him higher level work and multiplied what he could produce and thus consume.

Or, consider the story of two men who were watching a huge steam shovel removing earth in preparation for the building of Hoover Dam. Said one, "Think of all the men that shovel is putting out of work!" Replied the better economist of the two, "There wouldn’t be a single person work­ing on this project if all that earth had to be removed by men with their hands."

Yes, the automobile disem­ployed buggy workers, but in the same sense that the ox-drawn cart relieved primitive man from doing everything by hand. Failure to see this point leads many peo­ple to believe that automation causes unemployment.

If robots are the cause of un­employment, then the telephone —automated communication — must have wrought havoc. The fact? The operating companies employ over 700,000 people, and several hundred thousand are employed by the suppliers. But surely, some will contend, automatic dialing disemployed a great number of switchboard operators. The fact? There are nearly 50 per cent more operators today than in 1940. Why? Because automatic dialing made possible so much more use of the telephone than before. If the present volume of conversa­tions had to be connected manu­ally, at least 1,000,000 switchboard operators would be required. Of course, this is a fictitious "if." The manual operation would be so inefficient relative to automatic dialing that the volume would re­quire no such number.

If automation caused unemploy­ment, then it would follow that an addition to the work force of any mechanical energy equivalent to one man’s energy — one robot —would disemploy one man. How­ever, this is contrary to observed fact. Today in the U.S.A., each worker has perhaps 135 mechani­cal slaves — helpers or robots —working for him, each contribut­ing energy equivalent to the energy of one human worker.¹ If each robot displaced one worker, the unemployment figure would be 135 times the present work force — 10,800,000,000 — an utter ab­surdity.

If these robots do not displace workers, then where does all this extra energy go? Should we dis­cover the right answer, we will know whether they are the work­ers’ friends or foes and, as well, whether we should try to encour­age or discourage their prolifera­tion. Let’s try to find the answer.

In Grandfather’s Day

My grandfather, recalling the 1850′s, used to repeat, "Many times have I walked thirty miles in a day." His boast recently came to mind as I flew from New York City to Kansas City (1,100 miles) in two hours. It would have taken grandfather about 280 hours of walking to negotiate that distance. He would have been on his way to Kansas City for thirty-seven days. Only 365 round trips would have taken every day of his long life.

Grandfather, in his early days, had only his own energy at his disposal — just one man-power. Now assume that he had walked to Kansas City, taking 280 hours. I made it in two hours by jet. Isn’t it clear that something has to ac­count for that 278 hours miracu­lously, one might say, put at my disposal? What made this possi­ble? It was, among other factors, the billions upon billions of robot days that assisted in the construc­tion and the operation of that jet!²

But these robots did more than give me 278 hours unavailable to grandfather. There were 100 pas­sengers on that flight, a freeing for other use of 27,800 hours. Further, that very same jet may be good for 25,000 such flights or a total freeing of 695,000,000 hours. And that jet is only one of hundreds of commercial jets. Add all the commercial prop jobs and all the private planes, and the liberated hours become astronomi­cal. Anyway, that’s where some of the robots’ energy went, without putting anyone out of work.

The Chance to Grow

We must, of course, keep in mind that the energy of robots going into airplanes is but some very small fraction of all auto­mated energy. But the statistics do not matter; what is important is that we understand what these robots do for us and, also, to us. For one thing, they multiply our opportunities for unique, enrich­ing experiences. When taking the family for a drive at 60 miles per hour, speculate on why the trip is possible and what is propelling you at this speed! Think of the situation were only shank’s mare available. Or why you can read a book instead of washing the dishes, or write a poem instead of foraging for food. You will, per­haps, stand in awe of and give some credit to the robots for re­lieving you of the necessity of sloshing around in the rice pad­dies or scrounging for rabbits so you won’t starve or, yes, from making buggy whips.

Or even more: perhaps these robots have something to do with your very existence. Less than 400 years ago this land we call the U.S.A. had a population variously estimated at 250,000 to 1,000,000. Why so small? It was not because of the Indians’ inability to breed, nor because of unfriendly climate or infertile soils, nor for any lack of natural resources. It was be­cause a foraging economy would not support more than then ex­isted. Assuming no improvement over that type of economy — no robots except some horses — the chances are at least 200 to 1 that you would never have known adult life.

But back to grandfather: he never saw Kansas City; indeed, through his teen years, he never went beyond his walking orbit. I, on the other hand, have visited Hong Kong, as far from home as I can get; my air mileage alone is now equal to eighty loops around the world. Grandfather didn’t have time enough to do very many things. I have the time to do a thousand times as many things, and by reason of your and my me­chanical helpers, the robots. This, of course, explains why timesav­ers multiply busyness — there are so many more things we can do. For good or ill, we are far busier than our ancestors ever were.

Grandfather never talked over a telephone in his life. I reach my son — 2,600 miles away — in 10 sec­onds; I have talked across the Pacific, to Buenos Aires, Gander, London, Mexico, and to every nook and cranny of the U.S.A. If the robots have disemployed me, it is from the limited opportunities grandfather experienced. There is a better way to put it: the robots have liberated, not disemployed, humans.

Robots Are a Response

Robots put people out of work? On the contrary, robots become economically feasible and appear in our lives only as the result of a scarcity of human labor to accom­plish all the tasks we want done. It doesn’t pay to do by machine what can be done more cheaply by hand. Businessmen tend to mech­anize or automate after, rather than before, laborers have moved away from a particular job.

For example, our operation at FEE calls for three large mailings every two months, requiring 20 workers for two days on each oc­casion. When we began two dec­ades ago, we trained local house­wives for this part-time work and paid the hourly minimum wage of 80 cents. Afterward, the minimum was raised to $1.00 and later to $1.25. Now assume that FEE was on the brink of bankruptcy, that is, at that critical point where a few hundred dollars would tip the scales toward institutional sur­vival or closing, and that the latest minimum wage raised our costs to that point. What to do? We bought some robots in the form of a machine: press a button and it automatically collates, stuffs, seals, and stamps, doing the work of the women, quicker and at lower cost. True, the part-time women lost their "pin money" jobs but the rest of us were saved from losing ours.

Most people will say that the robots disemployed the women, a grave error. The culprit was none other than the minimum wage law — governmental interference with the free market. It was bad law that sent our women back to housework. As these costs of gov­ernmental intervention rise year after year, more and more em­ployers are faced with failure. The robots have performed a remark­able and incalculable rescue mis­sion.

Men to Match Machines

There isn’t anything wrong with automation per se. The seri­ous problems cropping up are not because of the robots but because of the people who are blessed with them. These problems, as near as I can fathom them, have their origin in an imbalance between technological know-how and econ­omic, political, and moral wisdom. The former is remindful of an ex­plosion; the decline of the latter amounts to apostasy. This is dan­gerous, for an increase in the robots we command calls for a commensurate increase in under­standing and virtue. It isn’t at all promising to put a chimp at the wheel of a truck, a truck driver at the controls of a jet, or a people in command of a powerful system of robots the interworkings of which they but dimly understand. If we aren’t to be done in by our own creations, what then is it we must understand?

The kind of automation that proliferates opportunities as to varieties of employment and, at the same time, multiplies the kinds of goods and services that may be obtained in exchange for the fruits of one’s labor, is exclu­sively a free market phenomenon.3 Such automation cannot, as is so often demonstrated, be trans­planted into or copied by authori­tarian societies. Robots that serve the masses are first the outcrop­pings of freedom and then of capi­tal formation, and cannot exist where these two absolute essen­tials are absent. For instance, steel mills have been built in Rus­sia, India, and other socialist countries, the effect on the masses of people being further impover­ishment. Automobiles are not be­ing produced for the masses in Russia; only the Commissars can have them. And so it goes. The point of all this is that if we sub­stitute the governmentally planned economy for the free market, the mass-serving robots will tend to disappear until they become as scarce and useless here as they are in the USSR! This is only a part of the understanding that must accompany our increase in technological know-how. There is much more.

Specialists Are Dependent

As only casual observation re­veals, automation spells specializa­tion — in our own case, to a fan­tastic degree. This, in turn, in­creases interdependence. Is it not self-evident that all of us — no ex­ceptions — are dependent on the free, uninhibited exchanges of our numerous specializations?⁴ In short, we are at a level in inter­dependence that can only be sus­tained by a highly intelligent, per­ceptive, and moral people. For support of this contention, reflect on what’s involved.

These exchanges, it is plain, are essential to survival. Nor can they, in a specialized society, be achieved by barter; they cannot take place without an economic circulatory system, that is, the medium of exchange — money. And any act, private or public, which lessens the integrity of the circu­latory medium correspondingly imperils the complex exchange processes. Inflation, brought on entirely by governmental excesses, and encouraged by a people who do not understand the simple econ­omics of the matter, is the culprit that erodes the integrity of the medium. Thus, a people who ex­travagantly automate and who do not at the same time know more about, and practice with increas­ing scrupulosity, the economic and moral facts of life are headed for a disaster greater than inflation has ever brought on in other countries.⁵ To fully appreciate this danger, one need but recognize how far each American is re­moved from self-subsistence, or to recognize how impossible survival would be were each individual to exist only on what he alone pro­duces. For reasons not easy to explain, understanding appears to be decreasing as robots are in­creasing.

One can hardly imagine a so­cietal situation more chaotic than one with specialization on the in­crease as freedom in transactions is on the wane. As robots increase and augment our specialization, so must there be an increase in free and willing exchange, freedom of choice, the free market. As robots appear, coercion — governmental control and rigging of the market, for instance — must correspond­ingly disappear. Simple reasoning as well as all the evidence attest to this fact. Yet, an alarming number of people— teachers, clergy, politicians, even entrepre­neurs — are blind to it.

Can Progress Occur in the Absence of Obstacles?

I have suggested that it isn’t easy to explain why understand­ing seems to shrink as automation expands. Is there, perhaps, a cor­relation between struggle and sound thinking and, conversely, between easy affluence and intel­lectual_ decadence? Of one thing we are certain: our robots confer more and more material satisfac­tions with less and less effort on our part.

The present trend is toward in­creasing material affluence in re­turn for decreasing effort. Liter­ally millions of individuals are ap­proaching a something-for-noth­ing way of life. Obviously, it is difficult to keep mentally rigorous when the robots are doing one’s work. Indeed, mental rigor may be impossible unless the individ­ual experiences a cultural growth commensurate with growth in af­fluence. This is to say that the in­dividual may vegetate unless he realizes that the purpose of wealth is to release him from drudgery so that he may more vigorously pursue those potentialities and ap­titudes uniquely his own. If the robots are to induce our getting out of life — vegetating — rather than getting ever deeper into life — growing — then the late Dean Inge’s observation is indeed pro­phetic, "Nothing fails like suc­cess."

The struggle to overcome is the genesis of becoming. It is the law of polarity, the tension of the op­posites, that spells growth, devel­opment, progress; at least this ap­pears to be Nature’s dictum. Men need new frontiers to explore and occupy and transcend, not in the form of politically contrived ob­stacles — heaven forbid! — but in the form of challenges worthy of the mind of the individual human being striving toward his poten­tial. When the struggle for exist­ence is eased, higher level strug­gles must be substituted: expand­ing awareness, perception, con­sciousness, in a word, difficult, hard-to-overcome intellectual, moral, and spiritual goals. This is by way of saying that disaster cannot be avoided unless a growth in wisdom be up to and on a parity with a growth in techno­logical know-how.

Elevating Our Ideals

But here is the rub: material hardship, once overcome, does not and cannot serve as the obstacle, the tension, the springboard for this required growth in wisdom, this flexing and expansion of the intellectual and spiritual faculties. Material hardship is an obstacle supplied by Nature or, if you pre­fer, by the environment. But once overcome, man is on his own; he has to make his own obstacles in the form of rationally con­structed goals. As the French sci­entist, Lecomte du Noüy, phrased it, "To really participate in the divine task, man must place his ideals as high as possible, out of reach if necessary." And is not this creating of our own obstacles, perhaps, the profound lesson we should learn from the robot ex­plosion?

The robots presuppose our knowing how to live with them. They, as an auto, TNT, sulphuric acid, a jet plane, are dangerous in the hands of those who do not know their properties, of those who are unaware of automation’s deeply significant meaning. The robot army, in its present dimen­sions, requires, at a minimum, an understanding of private property, free market, limited government principles — economic and political enlightenment — far superior to any such understanding ever achieved up to this period in his­tory.

—FOOTNOTES—

1 The figure of 135 mechanical slaves per worker is believed to be conservative, though there are too many variables to afford proof positive. The electrical in­dustry estimates that 67 KWH’s is equiv­alent to the energy of a man working an 8-hour shift for a year. More than a trillion KWH’s were generated in 1965, which would mean nearly 200 electrical robots for each person in the work force, assuming that there were no energy losses in transmission and use. Some ma­chines convert energy more efficiently than others; some humans are more en­ergetic than others; so the figure is a guess, at best.

2 I must not leave the impression that added mechanical energy alone accounts for all material progress. There is gain, for instance, in every voluntary ex­change. An idea, a flash of insight, an improved concept of freedom, the aban­donment of a coercive practice, an in­centive, a spirit of entrepreneurship, the practice of integrity, in short, spiritual activities, add incalculably to material as well as to other forms of progress

3 I am omitting any discussion of the robotry that does not originate with free market processes, the kind that can be and is made possible by the coercive col­lection of funds, the type used to make sputniks and to put men on the moon. Robots originating with socialist proc­esses impoverish rather than enrich the masses of people. For an explanation, see the chapter, "How Socialism Harms the Economy" in my Anything That’s Peaceful (Irvington, N. Y.: The Foun­dation for Economic Education, Inc., 1964).

4 Automation makes for specialization which, in turn, increases our interdepend­ence on the high quality behavior of each other. But a new and awesome depend­ence also develops: our dependence on the robots! They become necessities, that is, sources of energy we must have in order to survive. Example: man-contrived electrical energy. A century ago its elimi­nation would have had no perceptible effect. Were it suddenly eliminated today all of us, except the few who could exist by foraging, would perish. See "These Our Gifts," THE FREEMAN, October 1958.

⁵ Students of liberty will find it profit­able to read and reread Andrew Dickson White’s classic, Fiat Money Inflation in France (Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., $1.25 pa­per, $2.00 cloth, 125 pp.).

***

Labor Saver

When a machine is invented that does the work of twenty men at the wage cost of one, we are all beneficiaries. When a merchan­dising plan is invented that clips 5 per cent from the cost of dis­tribution, every consumer is a little better off. When electronics brings first-class entertainment and instruction into our homes at negligible expense, we all live a little more abundantly.

We make progress in two ways: first, by individual effort, and second, by the efforts of others. In the last thirty years the dullest and least enterprising among us have been lifted to a standard of living and comfort that could not be achieved by any, except a very few, two hundred years ago.

WILLIAM FEATHER, The William Feather Magazine, January 1966