By Richard Fernandez in PJ Media and
the Belmont Club blog
“Nichole Gracely has a master’s degree and was
one of Amazon’s best order pickers. Now, after protesting the company, she’s
homeless” — by choice, she declares in the Guardian. ‘Being homeless
is better than working for Amazon’ says the article, which details the act of
protest by voluntary unemployment.
I received $200 a week for the
following six months and I haven’t had any source of regular income since those
benefits lapsed. I sold everything in my apartment and left Pennsylvania as
fast as I could. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t even know that I
qualified for food stamps.
I furthered my Amazon protest while
homeless in Seattle. When the Hachette dispute flared up, I “flew a sign,”
street parlance for panhandling with a piece of cardboard: “I was an order
picker at amazon.com. Earned degrees. Been published. Now, I’m homeless,
writing and doing this. Anything helps.”
She was ‘alienated’ and left. For
years Marxism has maintained that mere paid work is usually alienating. (Entfremdung) was a
condition of misery caused by believing in something beyond ourselves which
made it impossible to be ourselves. To be happy you should forget
transcendence and get in touch with your inner animal. Do your thing.
Gracely could not be herself as a
warehouse worker and hence left. But Amazon may not ask be calling
Gracely back to work any time soon. Perhaps in acknowledgement that warehouse
work is inhuman after all, the company has started to hire robots. More
likely however, Amazon gave no thought to alienation. They did it to save
money.
ABC News describes the
company’s new ‘robot army’, fifteen thousand strong. They never quit.
Never get bored and don’t even have the concept of choosing liberating
homelessness.
A year ago, Amazon.com workers like
34-year-old Rejinaldo Rosales hiked miles of aisles each shift to “pick” each
item a customer ordered and prepare it for shipping.
Now the e-commerce giant boasts that
it has boosted efficiency and given workers’ legs a break by deploying more
than 15,000 wheeled robots to crisscross the floors of its biggest warehouses
and deliver stacks of toys, books and other products to employees.
“We pick two to three times faster
than we used to,” Rosales said during a short break from sorting merchandise
into bins at Amazon’s massive distribution center in Tracy, California, about
60 miles east of San Francisco. “It’s made the job a lot easier.”
The harsh reality is that for an
ever expanding list of occupations, robots are the workers of choice. All our Entfremdung are
belong to them. As this video shows, humans in Amazon warehouses are still
employed to “pick” the items the robots bring and put them in boxes. But
it may simply be a matter of time until robots do that too.
Another British newspaper sadly
notes that that Microsoft has started replacing human guards in routine tasks.
“The security guard of future is five feet tall, Wi-Fi-equipped and looks
uncannily like a cross between a Dalek and EVE from Wall-E. This is the K5
Autonomous Data Machine, the first product from Californian start-up
Knightscope designed to replace human guards everywhere from schools to
offices.” And they cost $6.25 an hour to employ.
Although everyone has heard of the
sad events in Ferguson Missouri, fewer have heard of the tragic developments in
Paterson New Jersey. Of the 594 students in
the Paterson School District, whose motto is
“preparing all children for college and a career”, who took the SAT only 19
managed to pass.
In Paterson, New Jersey only 19 kids
who took the SAT’s are considered college ready. This means that they scored at
least a 1500 out of 2400 on the standardized test, and this number is truly
shocking considering how large the school district is.
Paterson resident Jason Williams is
one of the lucky ones. He just graduated high school last year and has been
enrolled in college since September, after taking the SAT’s three times
determined to score over 1500. He says that the key to his success was not
falling victim to the streets.
“Just last summer, my friend and
teammate, he was shot and killed that summer and that really affected me,” he
said.
Faced with this daunting challenge
“the Paterson school district said that they no longer use SAT scores to gauge
students’ success.” Shifting the goal posts might have been a viable strategy
in the past, but it is unlikely to prevail against the ever-improving skills of
robot workers. Nobody is going to beat a pathway to the Paterson school
district seeking aspiring warehouse workers or security guards.
Ironically the spreading use of
robots creates jobs — but only for skilled people. “Robotics will be a major
driver for global job creation over the next five years,” according to one study. They enable entirely new processes and
create industries from whole cloth. But — and it is a big ‘but’ — they will be
the kind of jobs that the school districts are not particularly good at
creating.
One million industrial robots
currently in operation have been directly responsible for the creation of close
to three million jobs, the study concluded. A growth in robot use over the next
five years will result in the creation of one million high quality jobs around
the world. Robots will help to create jobs in some of the most critical
industries of this century: consumer electronics, food, solar & wind power,
and advanced battery manufacturing to name just a few. …
Marlin Steel, Baltimore, MD, USA, is
an excellent illustration of the points made in the Report regarding the
advantages of using robots within an unsafe working environment. Since Marlin
began introducing automation a dozen years ago, not only has the company
benefited, but so have the employees.
Drew Greenblatt, Marlin Steel´s CEO
of Marlin Steel bought the company in 1998. At that time, its employees were
paid $6/hour with no benefits and they typically produced 300 hand bends in an
hour. “It was a boring job and an unsafe job, with a low level of quality”,
said Mr. Greenblatt. “Now our employees are paid $25 to $30/hour including
bonuses, overtime and great benefits. Each employee oversees four robots that
produce 20,000 CNC bends in an hour and the quality has sky rocketed, Last year
was our most successful one as a business, exporting to more than 30 countries.
We’ve increased our workforce by more than a quarter. Thanks to the robots,
jobs at Marlin are both interesting and safe.
Of course, automation may threaten
institutions like the Paterson school district, even the SAT itself.
Glenn Reynolds argues that the school system is obsolete in his book, The New School. Both
Nichole Gracely and the Paterson school district students are products of the
Old School, and they are finding it hard to adjust to a world in which they
fill no recognizable need. The blurb on Reynold’s book argues they are 19th
century products in a 21st century world:
Public schools haven’t changed much
from the late 19th century industrial model and as a result young Americans are
left increasingly unprepared for a competitive global economy. At the same
time, Americans are spending more than they can afford on higher education,
driven by the kind of cheap credit that fueled the housing bubble. With college
graduates unable to secure employment or pay off student loans, the real-world
value of a traditional college education is in question.
In The New School, Glenn Harlan
Reynolds explains how parents, students and educators can, and must, reclaim
and remake American education. Already, Reynolds explains, many Americans are
abandoning traditional education for new models. Many are going to charter
schools or private schools, but others are going another step beyond and making
the leap to online education—over 1.8 million K-12 students already.
But making the change won’t be easy.
A century and a half is a big gap to jump. Legions of unionized public school
teachers and millions of graduates holding Old School diplomas face block
obsolescence. They will not go gentle into the good night. Nor is anyone safe. Some have argued that their fate will precede
humanity’s only by a little. Stephen Hawking argues that real AI will
doom humans.
“Humans, who are limited by slow
biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded”. Prof Stephen
Hawking, one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to
create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.
He told the BBC:”The development of
full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
As I have written elsewhere, it all
depends on what you mean by ‘human’, AI will certainly spell the end of
the materialistic model of human life. If intelligence and consciousness can
inhabit non-carbon forms; if the elan vital can wholly be expressed
as information then the human body is no more indispensable than the hard disk
you replaced whose contents you are restoring to a newer, faster model. It’s
what’s on the hard disk that matters. The wrinkly human body is no more
significant than the Amazon Cloud Micro-instance you can resurrect as a
Small-instance when you need to do a bigger job: the same in all respects
except better. The hardware changes; you may not even know what it is; so
long as the instance snapshot is migrated, who cares?
Hardware is disposable. Entfremdung
is pointless. We can’t be ourselves until we realize that it means going
somewhere beyond ourselves. Suddenly we are face to face with the
possibility that it’s the soul — for want of a better word — that
matters, where it lives and where it blows matters little. Now that we’ve
learned to call it something we all recognize in this Information Age then even
Hawking can utter it.
Who are we?
What a piece of work is a man! How
noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and
admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The
beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust?
More I wager, than the Paterson
school district dreams of.
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