So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Fading Fast]

Yeah, the "automation" they used to talk about so optimistically in the sixties, which was going to provide all this additional leisure time... really didn't work out that way.

Me and the robot working away
He looks at me, as if to say
"I'll be doing your job someday"
I'm stuck on the treadmill

- Richard Thompson, "Stuck on the Treadmill"

Again, just talking about how these topics were already being actively discussed back in the '50s (in fact, they were issues as far back as the 19th Century and even the 18th Century when the Industrial Revolution started), the same schism that you touch on - will automation take all our jobs or will automation improve our lives by freeing us from work and drudgery to pursue more interesting activities - always existed side by side.

In the 1950s novel "No Down Payment -" not an optimistic book - the feared technology then was transistors, "electronics" and "computing," in general, and atomic power - with most worrying about mass unemployment only a few years to a decade out (the 1960s) while one hopeful scientist sees all this new technology making life massively easier while greatly reducing the need for work.

Yeah, tell me about it! I spent my childhood going over the rosy future as forecast in the pages of Dad's National Geographic Magazine and thinking what a great future I was going to have. Still waiting for all those vacations to the moon that I was going to take or racing down a futuristic highway in a fancy car while reading the papers.

One vision of MY (!) future as shown in the pages of the Sept. 1969 issue.

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Great images. Well, I guess the good thing about growing up with my Dad is he did not have an optimistic view of the future and dismissed things like predictions of vacation to the moon and a work-free future as nonsense. I assumed life would be hard as I was told it was often.

 

[HanauMan]

My father was optimistic and had faith in progress. We'd watch The Jetsons together when I was a kid and he didn't laugh at me when I said I that I wanted to be the boy in the series (can't remember what he was called but funnily enough I remember that their robot (depicted above in an earlier comment) was called Rose or Rosie). Plus, Star Trek was being rerun. I think that all the optimism really disappeared in the 1970s as the economy suffered due to the shortage of oil and all the fall out from that. Still a tad tragic that there isn't a modern day American Skylab in orbit supported by shuttles. But, I guess, folk are too preoccupied with the problems on Earth, and there certainly are enough of those. Maybe, just maybe, there are kids around today dreaming the same things I did at their age but perhaps their dreams will become reality. Wouldn't that be nice?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The ultimate example of creative futurism in the Era was the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair. Created by "futurist" Norman Bel Geddes, the exhibit was built around a huge diorama of "America 1960," which would be united by a vast network of interstate highways, the automobile would be the dominant form of transportation, and pedestrians would be restricted to "elevated sidewalks". A future controlled by General Motors could expect nothing different.

Looking back at the Futurama, it's impressive how much of it they got right -- but the twist is, of course, that so much of that future turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Still a tad tragic that there isn't a modern day American Skylab in orbit supported by shuttles.

Well, there is the International Space Station.

 

[Fading Fast]

The ultimate example of creative futurism in the Era was the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair. Created by "futurist" Norman Bel Geddes, the exhibit was built around a huge diorama of "America 1960," which would be united by a vast network of interstate highways, the automobile would be the dominant form of transportation, and pedestrians would be restricted to "elevated sidewalks". A future controlled by General Motors could expect nothing different.

Looking back at the Futurama, it's impressive how much of it they got right -- but the twist is, of course, that so much of that future turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing.

That is a fantastic video. Creepy in its top-down-planing "happy" imperiousness, but fantastic. It definitely anticipated what Robert Moses would do (and try to do) to NYC.

Considering it was GM, I'm surprised it even allowed for airports, but I guess it knew it couldn't win that battle. I was surprised to see dirigibles get such positive attention as, I assume, this was made after the Hindenburg disaster which seemed to end airship travel almost on the spot.

Sure, there are some helicopter landing pads on skyscraper roof decks today, but much more limited than anticipated and the "autogyro" always seems to be in the near future but never gets here.

How kind of GM to even allow for sidewalks, I'm surprised it didn't just make everyone drive, everywhere, all the time. And if the old elevated trains are any indication - and despite the nice shining diorama - all those overhead platforms would turn the streets into a dark, shadowy, unpleasant place.

After 22 minutes of a world by planing, it was funny to hear, right at the end, the paean to American individualism and (intentional or not, as Superman was very new at the time) an echo of Superman's "American Way" theme (which I think came later in Superman's life anyway).

 

[Trenchfriend]

Oh yeah, my washing machine is now working again. I got rid of some money, but capitalism didn't sell a new, shortliving (crap) machine, HA!

When I'm extrapolating, my machine did just circa 200 washing-processes over the eight years.

 

[GHT]

How kind of GM to even allow for sidewalks, I'm surprised it didn't just make everyone drive, everywhere, all the time. And if the old elevated trains are any indication - and despite the nice shining diorama - all those overhead platforms would turn the streets into a dark, shadowy, unpleasant place.

The General Motors conspiracy is so well know that even those of us who live beyond the shores of Uncle Sam know of GM's shenanigans.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Alfred Sloan, the head cheese of GM in those days, had an ideology all his own. He was all for The Rights Of The Individual, as long as he himself was The Individual in question, but as for the unwashed masses they'd better fall in line and march to the GM/National Association of Manufacturers tune if they knew what was good for them. Or else he'd bring in the Michigan National Guard to show them what a big believer in individual action he was. The only difference between Sloan and Mussolini was that Sloan had a better tailor.

The connection between GM and Robert Moses is more than coincidental. Robert Caro discovered plenty of documentary evidence that GM was bankrolling Moses, essentially bribing him to ensure that GM-favored urban reorganization projects went ahead in New York. One of the more egregious examples was a phony "GM Better Highways Award," presented to Moses in 1952, which, along with a snazzy plaque, came with a $25,000 cash prize, which was obviously not granted in consideration of services rendered and to be yet rendered in the future. Nice work if you can get it.

 

[Fading Fast]

Alfred Sloan, the head cheese of GM in those days, had an ideology all his own. He was all for The Rights Of The Individual, as long as he himself was The Individual in question, but as for the unwashed masses they'd better fall in line and march to the GM/National Association of Manufacturers tune if they knew what was good for them. Or else he'd bring in the Michigan National Guard to show them what a big believer in individual action he was. The only difference between Sloan and Mussolini was that Sloan had a better tailor.

The connection between GM and Robert Moses is more than coincidental. Robert Caro discovered plenty of documentary evidence that GM was bankrolling Moses, essentially bribing him to ensure that GM-favored urban reorganization projects went ahead in New York. One of the more egregious examples was a phony "GM Better Highways Award," presented to Moses in 1952, which, along with a snazzy plaque, came with a $25,000 cash prize, which was obviously not granted in consideration of services rendered and to be yet rendered in the future. Nice work if you can get it.

The corrupt "partnership" of business and government is, sadly, as old as business and government.

I still wonder if America wouldn't have an amazing network of high-speed trains if not for that same corrupt nexus' control of post-war planing.

 

[3fingers]

Yeah, tell me about it! I spent my childhood going over the rosy future as forecast in the pages of Dad's National Geographic Magazine and thinking what a great future I was going to have. Still waiting for all those vacations to the moon that I was going to take or racing down a futuristic highway in a fancy car while reading the papers.

One vision of MY (!) future as shown in the pages of the Sept. 1969 issue.

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At this point I would be satisfied with the jet pack. I was promised 45 years ago I would have it in 25 years or less.

 

[Zombie_61]

"It's progress until the robot takes *your* job."
-- Some nameless victim of automation.

I'm bothered by self-checkouts for a lot of reasons. The majority of checkout people here are older women -- most of them in their fifties and sixties, and they aren't working for fulfillment, or to make "extra money," they're working because they have to to survive. When they lose their jobs to automation, as they inevitably will, what happens to them? You aren't going to see the average sixty-five year old woman who's been doing checkout work because it was all she could get after she lost her job at the fish cannery "going back to school to learn how to code so she can get a job with a tech startup." Tech startups don't hire sixty-five year old women, no matter how many coding certificates they have. "What's going to become of her?" is a legitimate question, and "well, that's just how it is" is not an acceptable answer. I've yet to hear an acceptable answer.

From 1979 to 1981 I worked for a local construction company that specialized in concrete work, and one of their customers was General Motors who, at the time, had three assembly plants in this part of southern California. I had an opportunity to talk directly with some of GM's employees about the automation that was then slowly being implemented in those plants, and every one of them was concerned about their future(s). Whenever they asked about what would happen to them when "robots" began doing their jobs, the company line was "Someone has to build those robots, don't they?"

All three of those facilities are long gone and I have no idea what happened to those employees, but I can't imagine any of them are building robots. And that's the one question that none of the "experts" have an answer for--how are people who are replaced by automation supposed to earn a living?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, you can always sell your blood.

 

[3fingers]

Whenever they asked about what would happen to them when "robots" began doing their jobs, the company line was "Someone has to build those robots, don't they?"

It is coming full circle. One of my old coworkers had a family member who got in on the early days of designing and building robots for production lines.
It has now progressed to the point where new robots are being built by robots.

As far as what the replaced employees do, from my observation of plant closings and technology pushing people out, most are employed in some way, but the majority never recover to the standard of living they once enjoyed.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Could robots be the evolutionary future of mankind ?

It is interesting to note that as robots become more human, humans become more robotic & as robots gain in humanity, humans lose theirs. For a species that considers it's self so intelligent, it's remarkable how easily it becomes enslaved by it's own technology. Maybe we haven't been programmed to rise up against the machines.

 

[tonyb]

...
As far as what the replaced employees do, from my observation of plant closings and technology pushing people out, most are employed in some way, but the majority never recover to the standard of living they once enjoyed.

That’s about the size of it.

 

[Fading Fast]

I spent the first twelve years of my post-college career learning a skill that was destroyed by the internet (aided by some regulatory change). I've lived job destroying technology. While I was able to "re-invent" myself - a euphemism for living in fear, taking a massive pay cut and learning a new skill in (in my case, near) middle age - I know many who weren't able to do that for many reasons, in particular, being too old to pull it off.

Also, I saw many in back office, clerical, mid-level accounting, etc. positions whose thirty year skills were rendered useless by technology and the majority of them never worked again in jobs that paid anywhere near what they had been earning. The first two companies that I worked for tried everything they could to protect those jobs - they were partnership firms so the owners had their own capital on the line (i.e., not a public company with anonymous stockholders). The first company went bankrupt and the owners lost most of what they had. The second company nearly went bankrupt and sold out for pennies on the former dollar.

I have no idea what could have stopped it. Once other established companies who didn't try to save their employees' jobs and new companies with out any "legacy" overhead (old technology and senior workers) adopted the new technology, the older companies that didn't change or tried to change slowly - that tried to save everyone's job (like the two I noted) - lost marketshare and, eventually, failed.

Having lived through three decades of this, I'd say (very back of the envelope), thirty or so percent of the workers never work again or work in entry level jobs not at all equal in pay to what they had; sixty or so percent end up in lower paying jobs, but with a shot to rebuild and ten percent do okay - they get the same or a better paying job. Hence, 90% or so end up worse with only some of those even having a shot at recovering over time.

Edit add: I just re-read this and want to emphasize that the above events and numbers are just from my personal experiences in a field that has been shrinking - fewer companies, fewer jobs, less business, meaningfully lower profits - for thirty straight years owing to technology and regulatory changes. I was not trying to comment on others' experiences or claim that the numbers I noted apply to anyone else - they are just what I've seen in my field.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Could robots be the evolutionary future of mankind ?

It is interesting to note that as robots become more human, humans become more robotic & as robots gain in humanity, humans lose theirs. For a species that considers it's self so intelligent, it's remarkable how easily it becomes enslaved by it's own technology. Maybe we haven't been programmed to rise up against the machines.

And when you get to the point where the machines that you use are capable of actually rewiring your brain to make you more dependent on those machines, one has to use one's last fleeting moments of independent thought to wonder if maybe Ned Ludd was right.

 

[2jakes]

And when you get to the point where the machines that you use are capable of actually rewiring your brain to make you more dependent on those machines, one has to use one's last fleeting moments of independent thought to wonder if maybe Ned Ludd was right.

She can rewire my brains if she can find them---any time!

Wow---I thought Doc Brown was only interested in time traveling DeLoreans.

 

[GHT]

And when you get to the point where the machines that you use are capable of actually rewiring your brain to make you more dependent on those machines, one has to use one's last fleeting moments of independent thought to wonder if maybe Ned Ludd was right.

The term Luddite gets bandied around so much that most don't realise that it wasn't the technology that they were protesting about. Although The Luddites were a radical group of English textile workers, who, in the 19th century destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest. Their gripe was the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labour practices. And that's the point that has been made here, the use of technology to consign skilled work to the scrap heap, thus rendering the skilled workers to nothing more than unskilled labour.

The Luddites knew, as we all do, you can't uninvent something once it's common knowledge, it's the underhand way that new technology is deployed that's so deceitful. You only have to read Lizzie's account of Alfred Sloan to see the point.

Alfred Sloan, the head cheese of GM in those days, had an ideology all his own. He was all for The Rights Of The Individual, as long as he himself was The Individual in question, but as for the unwashed masses they'd better fall in line and march to the GM/National Association of Manufacturers tune if they knew what was good for them. Or else he'd bring in the Michigan National Guard to show them what a big believer in individual action he was. The only difference between Sloan and Mussolini was that Sloan had a better tailor.

The connection between GM and Robert Moses is more than coincidental. Robert Caro discovered plenty of documentary evidence that GM was bankrolling Moses, essentially bribing him to ensure that GM-favored urban reorganization projects went ahead in New York. One of the more egregious examples was a phony "GM Better Highways Award," presented to Moses in 1952, which, along with a snazzy plaque, came with a $25,000 cash prize, which was obviously not granted in consideration of services rendered and to be yet rendered in the future. Nice work if you can get it.

Nowadays, the internet is causing the wholesale closure of High Street Banks, and the High Street itself, with the likes of companies like Amazon. But people flock to them, just as they have embraced the results of previous technology, which is why it can't be uninvented. I don't know what the answer is, perhaps Lizzie is right, bring back Ned Ludd.

 

[TimeWarpWife]

"It's progress until the robot takes *your* job."
-- Some nameless victim of automation.

I'm bothered by self-checkouts for a lot of reasons. The majority of checkout people here are older women -- most of them in their fifties and sixties, and they aren't working for fulfillment, or to make "extra money," they're working because they have to to survive. When they lose their jobs to automation, as they inevitably will, what happens to them? You aren't going to see the average sixty-five year old woman who's been doing checkout work because it was all she could get after she lost her job at the fish cannery "going back to school to learn how to code so she can get a job with a tech startup." Tech startups don't hire sixty-five year old women, no matter how many coding certificates they have. "What's going to become of her?" is a legitimate question, and "well, that's just how it is" is not an acceptable answer. I've yet to hear an acceptable answer.

Just last night a friend of mine was complaining that while she can get a lot of temporary positions as an administrative assistant, she can't get a permanent position. She left her last permanent job to care for her mother who was suffering from dementia and old age and was out of the workforce for about 2 years. It's been 4 years since she started looking for a new job, but with no success yet. She's 54 and has worked all of her adult life in this field. I can only imagine with everyone having their own computers and doing most of their own correspondence, making appointments, etc. themselves is one of the reasons she's having difficulty getting permanent employment. She doesn't have any interest in going to school to learn to do something else, but more importantly she doesn't have the money since she's still helping to pay off her daughter's college loans and dd's upcoming wedding next year.

And earlier today, I read an article about robots now being used as police officers in Dubai, making up 25% of their police force. It never crossed my mind that the jobs of human police officers might one day be obsolete. Although, I'm not sure that in crime-ridden areas like Chicago the robot officers will be any safer from being shot at than their human counterparts.