Amazon Go and the future of work

For years there's been a lot of discussion about a moment somewhen in the future when automation would replace millions of workers.

We are closing in on that moment.

With Amazon's automated stores, around 7 million people are in danger of losing their jobs within a few years. Cashiers and Retail Salespersons are the #1 and #2 most common professions in the USA. Add to that number 2 million truck drivers under threat by Uber's autonomous vehicles. We are moving towards a future where tens of millions of people around the World will be unemployed over a very short period of time. This is no longer the stuff of long-term university studies and economic projections. It's starting soon.

Thoughts and predictions:

The Digital Revolution is only beggining. It will climax when everyone, everywhere is involved with computers. And by the end of it, there will be few other jobs except software and hardware. Just as the Industrial Revolution led to most people working as factory workers, the Digital Revolution will lead to most people becoming software and hardware engineers.

We need to start training millions of people from the hole of no-qualifications-to-do-anything-else. The alternative is mass unemployment and economic recession. If you think that won't affect you, here's a study about how periods of economic recession are directly linked to political radicalization.

It's hard to estimate the impact of something in the future. One thing we can do is look to the past. Recent studies show that the Industrial Revolution was one of the few periods in history with a combination of economic growth with a collapse in the general quality of life. In England, for instance, it led to a shortened lifespan and poorer nutrition. With the growth of income inequality and the loss of millions of jobs to automation we are on our way to a repeat.

The current return of protectionism might be one of the unintended consequences of the Digital Revolution. As a misguided attempt to stop the job destruction wrought by automation, it attacks immigration and free trade because they feel like things that can be stopped. So politicians attack what's easiest to fix, instead of the actual problem.

The Digital Economy and its Discontents

Things such as the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage and safety regulations came out of years of violent and brutal struggle between capital and labor. These series of agreements led to the working conditions we know today. We take these things for granted in our day-to-day, but they were fought for.

Today, the struggle for power is between those who own the software and those who use it.

Why, for instance, does Facebook forbid its users from downloading their own data out of their platform? The same reason Microsoft never allowed Word files to be fully compatible with any other editor. They own the software and you are only licensing it. You are the User, they are still the Owner. Using Intellectual Property laws and impossible to read Terms of Service Agreements they can protect themselves from your right to choose. If Word files were compatible with other text editors, would the enterprise be so beholden to it? If social networks were compatible with each other, i.e. allowing us to keep our contacts and change services freely, would we keep using the same one for so long? Or would we shop around occasionally, picking the right one for each moment of our lives? Of course if this was true something like Facebook would never be worth billions of dollars. But this is Facebook's problem, not ours. One of the ways corporations are taking away our rights is by denying us the choice to leave by not giving us access to our own data. If you think this isn't a deliberate effort, here's Facebook board member Peter Thiel talking about how good businesses are actually monopolies.

A lot of software empires are built on the falsity of "it can't be done". Software-makers say they can't keep do what they do if they were obliged to share it all with their competitors. Of course it can be done, it just threatens the incredible profits of the companies involved, so they don't do it. This is part of their defense against the power of users to ditch their service, and the power of engineers to replace it. If we could leave with our data, we might see real innovation and competition. But we can't take our data away, so we don't leave, so competing services don't get built.

IP Law is one of the few forms of protection in a world where you can learn how to make a Twitter clone in 7 days. How much of the TPP was about protecting Intellectual Property? It included provisions to make you into a criminal for circumventing DRM, and asked for legislation making to make sure anything could be patented. Combined with the idea that Intellectual Property can last hundreds of years, companies are building fortified empires of eternal IP. This is what's meant by "Intellectual Property is the new oil". Wells are being made to mine information from the real world, and laws are passed to fortify agaisnt competition. Instead of lands in Saudi Arabia for Aramco, we have data being mined from everyone and everything. And just like in the past, laws and treaties are passed to make sure that those wells are safe and protected.

A few ideas on how to fix this

Legislate interopability. Software should talk to each other. There are a lot of software empires built on the restrictions of agaisnt user choice. If we really believe that people's choices determines the best outcome, then we need to give people a real choice to leave. Companies have no real incentive to do this. It might be that the only way forward is legislation.

Users must own their own data. Watch the film Hyper-Reality if you haven't already. Notice how much of it is actually about data. Most of the dystopias we imagine today are about the fact that users don't own their own data. If you owned and controlled your own data, a lot of the scary futures we can imagine today can't happen. Corporate power would be curtailed, and governments would not be able to watch you. Again, corporations have no incentives to do this either, so legislation is probably necessary.

As a society, get serious about open-source software and hardware. Steve Jobs would call the computer "the bycicle of the mind". Yet productivity hasn't increased that much, on average, since the 1970s. I happen to believe that the average programmer is far more productive than a lot of the factory workers of 50 years ago. So, here's a possible explanation: Closed-source software means that people have been imprisoned by imperfect solutions for their needs, and they can't change it. Because software is closed-source the end-user is in a state of functionality lock. He can't extend the software to make it any more efficient to his particular needs. Because the user can't change anything significant (outside of rewriting the whole software) he doesn't learn to program. Having more people learn to program and modify their own software might give us huge productivity gains. But users don't do it, because why would you if you can't change your day-to-day applications with it? On the other side developers feel like they can't open-source, because how can you make money out of that? So, we end up with marginal productivity gains. If this explanation is right, then having open-source software would encourage more people to treat their software the way they treat any other product they own. They would learn how to take care of it, change it to meet their needs, and make their own modifications. And if they can share modifications with each other, it would create a new market for software hobbyists.

Let's imagine this hypothesis is proven right. How can we make this happen? A possible solution is for applications to be open-sourced but DRM in your computer preventing unlicensed code from running. This is pretty much the way Apple already runs the App Store on iOS. Open-sourcing applications with minimal DRM so developers can still make money and users can change them to suit their individual needs would mean that no one would lose anything and everyone would benefit. This is exactly the description of a market failure. As a bonus, if automation means everyone must become a software or hardware engineer of some sort, everyone gets a big incentive to learn how to code.

These are things I believe can be done, on the short-term, to change things for the better. Here's an article from a software engineer on Hacker News. He doesn't even like computers anymore. This resonated with a lot of people in the comments, because the computer has changed from a tool of liberation to one of oppression. I believe we can change this back. But if we are serious about changing the way things are going, there's one more idea to consider.

We might have to give up on competition as a driving force for our society

Competition has served us well so far. In nomadic tribes, it kept us alive. In agricultural society, it meant we kept finding ways to make more and more food. Today, modern capitalism uses it to fuel people into making things. The competition between people is the engine of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" that provides for everyone to live in opulence.

Yet, consider the following thought experiment. Is it possible that, in the near future we can use automation to provide food and shelter for most of humanity at minimal cost? Because if we can automate most of the labor in agriculture and most of the labor in construction we can provide food and shelter in huge numbers. 10% or 20% of the population could make enough food and shelter for all the rest. If this is true, then are we needlessly prolonging human suffering? If we can build food and shelter for the majority of the people on Earth at near-zero cost, then competition has run its course. What use can it possibly have after that? If we don't stop and try to answer that question, we could be going down a cycle of "creative destruction" where we will be destroying useful things just so we can keep competing with each other.

This is exactly what I see happening in the Artificial Intelligence race. Why are so many companies, like Amazon, automating so much, so quickly? Because Amazon has to compete with Google, and if Google has more money they can hire better people, make better tools, and eventually outgrow Amazon. If you outgrow Amazon you can take over their business. So in order for people to have a job, they have to compete with each other. In order for companies to survive, they have to compete with other companies. On and on it goes. Why will we make military AIs in the future? Because countries compete with each other. They have to, for control of goods and markets so that they can each provide the best possible life for their citizens. If they don't, their leaders are replaced, because people act in their own interests, and they replace leaders who don't provide for them. So leaders are also in competition with each other.

Imagine yourself describing this logic to a visitor from another planet. Amazon and Uber working on technology that will make millions of people out of work. At th every least it will create instability and tremendous human suffering.

And in the end, having a lot more money doesn't actually make people that much happier, so who will benefit?

On the same wavelength, why is Google working on Aritificial Intelligence?

What do they want to do with it? Design targeted ads? Does that mean we will soon have a superintelligence convincing people to buy more stuff? At what point is there a difference between that and mind control? Will we even be able to tell, if it's that much smarter than we are?

What is the purpose of having an Artificial Intelligence in the first place? The stock answer is progress for the sake of progress, because "progress is always good". Here is a graph comparing GDP growth to average happiness, in the UK, since 1973. Progress isn't making anyone anyone happier. So why do we keep doing it?

Capitalism used our instinct to compete and repurposed it to produce a superabundance of goods. But now that we everything we need, we don't know what to do next, because we are still allowing our instinct to guide us. Instead we could pause and reflect and wonder whether we are following it to oblivion.

Of course you might think, this does not apply to you. You're not a part of this. Or you might be a UX designer or a software engineer or a data scientist. And you think your profession will shield you from all of this and keep you on the good side of change. Maybe it will make you a lot of money. I have a few questions:

What kind of society do you want to live in?

Is it happy society with room for all of its citizens to be productive?

If that's the case, what kind of world are you building?

Do you think the software you are making is objectively good?

Or is it only good for you, and the people you work with?

The problem is computer

The consensus is and always has been that growing automation is the main cause for unemployment today. The lower middle class of many countries used to find steady employment in manufacturing. Now they don't, and they're angry, and they are radicalizing politically (*1). Our belief in competition means we are now working on technologies that can replace humanity in most of today's labor. Yet we have no plan for what to do as it actually happens.

The default answer to all of this is

"We've always figured it out in the end. We'll do it again."

This is just a way of avoiding personal responsibility by generalizing the costs of individual action. People work at Amazon. People work at Uber. They are making these technologies, instead of others. This is a choice. Society is not going to come up with a solution for all of our problems by itself. People are going to come up with solutions for the problems, and society will adopt them. But if we are all doing nothing because we think society corrects itself automatically, nothing will happen. "We'll figure it out later" is the kind of advice you wouldn't give your neighbour when moving house. So why do we accept it as a long-term plan for civilization?

Moments like this remind me of a quote from Jeanne Liedtka, a professor at the Darden School of the University of Virginia.

When actions move faster than knowledge acquired, bad things happen.

She was talking about business. But I think it applies equally to our society.

Here's another thought experiment. Describe to yourself a future you'd like to live in.

Not a future for just you, a future for everybody. People you know, your neighbors, your fellow citizens, the city you live, your country, and the World.

Everything is interconnected. You can't get away with imagining your own personal utopia. Ask yourself this question:

Are you working towards making that future a reality?

Or are you contributing towards something else?

A few suggestions for things you can do right now

Support the Free Software Foundation

Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Start and support efforts agaisnt taking away your rights to your data

Curtail your use of services that take away your rights to your data. A good guide here is Stallman's Facebook Presence

Learn to code. Free Code Camp is a great resource for this

If you already know how to code

Contribute or start an open-source project that can replace a proprietary service.(*2)

Make software that's extensible by the user

Think of ways you could make your software open-source

Recommended Reading:

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1: Vaclav Smil, in an interview for Wired a few years ago:

Q. Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why?

A. In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

2: I would love to see a protocol to replace all social media. Or at least, Twitter. In a way, Aaron Schwartz's RSS protocol was a way to do just that. Maybe we need a new version of RSS that can replace Facebook and Snapchat.

Feel free to e-mail me with suggestions talktome@rafaelkino.com