We can’t all be systems analysts

Call me a latent Luddite, but I wonder what will happen when automation makes millions of blue-collar workers redundant.

I realise that similar concerns were voiced when the first machines were installed to turn manufacturies into factories. The concerns led to action, and back in the early 20^th century some French labourers gave rise to the word ‘sabotage’ by throwing their wooden shoes (sabots) into the works.

And what do you know, they needn’t have worried. After the first growth pains, industrial productivity increased no end, new factories, even new industries, popped up like mushrooms after an August rain, and blue-collar workers became relatively prosperous rather than absolutely impoverished.

Those who used to make candles began to produce electric bulbs, wheelwrights and carters learned how to make cars, and chaps who were wizards at building windmills switched to constructing power stations (they may now have to switch back, but that’s a separate conversation).

Yet Bertie Russell stated, correctly, that something that happened in the past is no guarantee that it’ll happen in the future. The thought is generally sound, although the illustration he offered was slightly bizarre: the sun, he said, may still not rise tomorrow even if it rose yesterday.

But yes, similar fears have been voiced and allayed in the past. However, the automation revolution may not be as benign as its industrial precursor, which actually wasn’t excessively benign.

If hundreds of workers toiling at a conveyor belt can be replaced with a couple of computer geeks adept at pushing the right buttons, we are talking about eliminating, rather than rechannelling, blue-collar employment. And, contrary to liberal wishful thinking, not everyone can become a computer geek.

There exist millions of people not endowed with the mental faculties required to perform in an economy defined by information technology, robotic automation and artificial intelligence. We may all be created equal in the eyes of God and the US Declaration of Independence, but we aren’t all created equally intelligent.

One difference between now and then is the speed at which change occurs. Thanks to tremendous technological advances, what used to take years now takes months, weeks or even days. So even assuming, counterintuitively, that millions of blue-collar workers can retrain to be systems analysts, they may not have enough time at their disposal.

Computers can now fly planes, navigate ships, drive trains and even cars, with some gadgets easily performing tasks that used to keep thousands employed. Where will those thousands go, now that their skills are no longer needed?

Globalisation is another factor that exacerbates this problem. Manufacturing industries, those that tend to employ muscle, move to places where muscle is cheap, outsourcing production to Third World countries.

After all, we can’t survive by just selling software packages to one another. Someone has to make things we use every day, and the natural tendency is for manufacturers to look for those who can make those things cheaply.

That puts more pressure on blue-collar employment – even assuming workers could learn how to make widgets by operating robots, they’ll still come up empty if those widgets are now made in China or Brazil. Moreover, shifting manufacturing to Third World countries creates a strategic risk.

Some of those countries may like our money but not necessarily us. They can become, or side with, our enemies at the drop of a bomb. At least that would solve the problem of blue-collar workers – they could all go into battle, thereby keeping their numbers down to a sensible level.

Such doomsday scenarios apart, there is no denying that accelerated automation will produce crowds of people passing over from employment to the tender mercies of the state. The innately tyrannical modern state wouldn’t mind: the more people depend on it for their livelihood, the more powerful will the state become. And rapacious appetite for ever-growing power is a feature of all modern states without exception.

Here the interests of the state overlap with the urges of our exceedingly work-shy masses. We depend on millions of migrants doing menial jobs because British people don’t want to do them. They’d rather draw the King’s shilling by malingering and claiming disability.

Thus, burgeoning automation may well become an instrument of state tyranny, general social malaise, corrupted morality and reduced national security. And now come the first words I think British babies, destined to become pragmatic adults, learn in their cribs: so what are we going to do about it?

I’m not going to equivocate about this. My reply is resolute and unequivocal: I haven’t a clue.

If the history of technology teaches one lesson, it’s that, if things can be done, they will be done – regardless of the attendant concerns. We’ll continue to automate and computerise every step we take in life, even if it means producing a net loss in the areas I’ve outlined.

Other than that, I really have no answers. But I do have lots of questions, and I count on those better-versed in the relevant disciplines to enlighten me. Let’s just say that so far such questions haven’t been answered, and they aren’t even often asked.

That’s a pity because problems of catastrophic proportions may well be looming. We may be automating our way to disaster – and I did tell you I’m a closet Luddite.