Working Towards No Work - Part 1

Two weeks ago, I wrote about why I think laws requiring a percentage of the work force to be human is a bad idea, using it to transition into a vision of a "Post-Work" world.  This week I want to continue on that theme and expand it a bit, focusing on the momentum towards it, the reasons why we need it and some thoughts on how to get there.

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/Open (aside)

Last week, I did not write, but took the Middle School Daughter Unit camping.  Or, rather, her school did and I was allowed to tag along as long as I drove and fed the teachers leading the expedition.  We visited a Wolf Sanctuary and then went caving in lava tubes in and around El Malpais National Monument.  Visit both if you can, but definitely have a guide for the caves: it is easy to get lost.

/Close (aside)
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Post-Work, not Post-Scarcity

Most people who talk about life in a fully automated society label it "Post-Scarcity".  This is not what I'm talking about.  Or at least, not yet.  To get to a full on Post-Scarcity world, we need to go beyond automation into the realm of matter reconstruction.

With work place automation, we are off loading the work to machines, but we are still dealing with the same resources.  The same amount of arable land to grow food, the same amount of water in the same occasionally convenient places.  All the automation does is help us maximize our use of those resources.  This is Post-Work.  The available resources are still limited.

For Post-Scarcity, we need to be able to build food, water and consumer packaged goods from things that are not food, water or goods.  Like breaking a rock down into its constituent atoms and then re-assembling them into other goods that are more useful to the people in the immediate location.  I'm not talking about vat-growing a steak.  Instead, this is building the steak atom-by-atom in the back of the restaurant, already cooked, on demand.  The current state-of-the-art for working on that scale has a long way to go, but is not outside the realm of 'eventually.'

Post-Work is a landing on the staircase that leads to Post-Scarcity, but does not get us all of the way there.

It is Inevitable, Mr. Anderson

With annoying definition pedantry things out of the way, let's talk about why work automation is going to happen (oh, let's!).  The reason is simple: the short, medium and long term gains for employers are just too high.

Robots don't sleep.  They don't need vacations.  They don't complain about work hours or have families or needs outside of the work place.  They have the potential to get sick (break), but their medical plan does not cringe at fire-and-replace if the repair cost is too high.  And that's for the high cost, physical world automation.  Many of us, myself included, will lose our jobs (if I had one) to software.  Then all of the ills of the mechanical world are tossed out (to be replaced by bugs and viruses, to be sure, but still more reliable).

Beyond the world of HR, automation adds one other significant factor: consistency of output.  We humans with our five imperfect senses cannot repeat tasks down to the millimeter consistently.  Those that can are considered savants or somewhere on the autism spectrum.  They are not sitting in the middle of the bell curve with the rest of us baseline humans.

As I said in my piece two weeks ago, those companies that automate quickly and completely will have a significant edge over those that do not.  If those companies find themselves in jurisdictions that attempt to force human labor on them, they will lobby against them, eventually moving to someplace that will allow them to operate as they want.

Next Week - I Promise

So, this rant is already subjecting all five of you who read this to a longer article than I think your patience can handle.  I'm going to push the rest of this to next week's installment.  The two topics left are:

• Why work place automation MUST happen (Hint: there are 7.5 Billion reasons and growing).
• How we make the transition to Post-Work with the least amount of pain (I don't have a clue, and this is the real reason it's getting pushed to next week).

Affirmative Automation

This week, I'm going to continue ignoring the repeal of Net Neutrality.  Instead I want to return to the concept of workplace automation.

Human Quotas

In particular, this article from The Guardian, US Edition, "Rise of robotics will upend laws and lead to human job quotas, study says."  The article in about a report from the International Bar Association on the rise of the robot workforce.  Despite the headline, the article spends little time talking about human quotas, instead documenting the rise of workplace automation.  Which is something anyone paying any kind of attention already knew about.

Despite the disparity between the headline and the content, the article does mention that the report does suggest that governments may attempt to regulate the job market, requiring that employers hire some number of humans.  In general, I think that this would be a colossal mistake.

Mismatched

(We're going to set aside the issues of building and maintaining automation for this article.  They are short term jobs that will also ultimately die to automation.  Eventually the robots will be building and maintaining themselves.)

The problem is that humans, as non-specialized tool users, will never be able to compete with task specific robots.  Those will always be able to do the task for which they are designed faster, more reliably and more cheaply than something like the jack-of-all-trades design that is the human body.

As that is the case, requiring humans to do similar work to the robots right next to them will reduce the competitive advantage of the company/country that enacts these quotas.  Other jurisdictions that allow their employers to go 'full auto' will have companies that can produce the same product cheaper and with higher quality, undercutting the quota companies and driving them out of business.  And then where will the humans work?

Why 'Work'

For me, the problem is the word 'Work'.  For the purposes of this rant, I'm going to define 'work' as the 'trade of free time for currency'.  Our current economy, at least in most developed economies, is based on the need for the population to work so that they can:

1. earn money so that they can 
2. spend money so that
3. other people can work so that they can
4. buy the things that the first people make/do.

We are all trading our free time so that we can buy things that other people make by trading their free time so that they can buy the things that we make.  This is the 'Business Cycle'.

(courtesy of the BBC)

But what if our "Needs & wants' were met without work because automation?  What would we do then?  That is the question that a fully automated work force starts to ask.

The Real Question

Work is supposed to reward effort with access to more and better resources through the middle many of currency.  We are supposed to be a meritocracy (a subject for debate).  But if there is no work to reward, then how do we know who is pulling their weight and who is just sitting around playing video games all day long?

This is the question that needs to be debated in the halls of power: how do we reward actions that our society deems meritorious?  It does not need to be money.  It could be Facebook 'Likes' (not to give the great and glorious Zuch any ideas to expand his already growing FB Economy).  It could be YouTube subscriptions or something like gaming achievements.  Maybe these could be used for access to higher tier goods and services... but that just swaps dollars and pounds for likes and achievements.

What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?

Maybe the real issue is not how we reward effort or creativity, but that we all feel that things like 'effort' and 'reward' need to exist.  I realize that competitiveness is baked into the human psyche after millions of years of evolution, but it may be time to start working those out of our minds.  Instead of doing things because there is an external reward, we should be doing things because the doing of those things is reward enough.  It is a nice thought.

In reality, maybe the first step is to actively start automating government.  When the lawmakers start to see their lives disrupted, something will happen.  Maybe quotas, maybe Universal Basic Income, maybe something else, but it will be a step towards a post-work human society.

The Bixby Button

It is time once again for me to fret and strut my hour upon the Blog-o-sphere.  The obvious targets for my sound and fury are all of the April Fool's jokes that bounced around the interwebs on Saturday, but no; those are asking for the abuse and so I will pass them by.

Of course, my favorite was Google Gnome.

Instead, I'll focus my ire on something else: the Galaxy S8 announcement, specifically Bixby.  As a brief disclaimer, I worked for Samsung for over nine years, but I'll try not to let any sentiment, good or bad, color my judgement.

Wait.  Not that Bixby.

A Kinder, Gentler Bixby

For those of you who do not follow smartphone press releases (what do you do with your lives?), Bixby is Samsung's voice assistant offering, but there is more.  It is also a info-card system on screen (Bixby Home) and an image recognition system through the phone's camera (Bixby Vision).  Each is designed to add context and suggestions to the actions people take with their Galaxy S8 phone.

What separates it from the other voice assistants already in market (and also on the Android driven S8) are a few things:

1. It can work with supported third party apps and potentially do anything that the user can do with their hands.  While there aren't many such apps yet, that may change over time depending on how aggressive Samsung goes after developers.
2. It can do image recognition.  If you see an object that you like, a pair of shoes or a car or whatever, then point the S8 camera at it and it will bring up information about that object.
3. It can interface with Samsung's going line of smart things, including SmartThings.  This is maybe the biggest differentiater as Samsung makes many of the things that we all want to be smart.  They can directly influence products as they go to market instead of trying to buy their way into someone else's refrigerator or TV line.

That Being Said...

There are a few things that are less good about Bixby versus some of the other voice assistants on the market.

First, there is a button.  For me, one of the biggest advantages of Alexa or Google Home is that they are completely hands free.  I can be washing the dishes and get the lights turned on or off, skip a music track or get the weather.  In all fairness, the same can be said of Siri, Cortana and the in-phone version of the Google Assistant.  But for a smart home, it make is less useful.

Next, it is only on the Galaxy S8 and S8+.  While the Galaxy line of phones are popular, this is still a flagship product that will take time to trickle down to the masses.  Admittedly, smart home owners and users are closer to the 1% (called mass premium consumers in marketing parlance), but the Venn diagram of smart home owners and Galaxy early adopters strikes me as small right now.

Finally (at least for the purposes of this article), this is not Samsung's first foray into the world of voice assistants.  They launched S-Voice in 2012 in response to Siri.  It did not go well.  Much of this was due to a lack of developer support and buggy performance.  Things that do not bode well for Bixby.

There is Room

I hope that Bixby does well.  Not only for all of my former colleagues at Samsung and their job security, but also because it increases the competition in this area.  I would hate for the consumer innovation world to give up on this thinking that Amazon, Apple and Google have won.  Remember, In the early 2000's, we were a Yahoo! world and no one thought we needed Google.  There is still room for someone to reinvent the voice assistant market.

That's my sound and fury for this week.