Posts Tagged ‘automation’
“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”*…
… which might be the same thing?
As more and more folks are fearing obsolescence (if not, indeed, subjugation) by emerging technology, Matthew Wills reminds us that this fear– especially as embodied in androids– has a long (and dark) history here in the U.S…
Our word “robot” comes from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. In it, historian of robots Dustin A. Abnet explains, Čapek repurposed the Czech word for “drudgery” or “servitude” to refer to the artificial workers produced by the play’s Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots) company. [See also here.] Created from synthetic organic material, and thus more android than mechanical, these worker-roboti ultimately overthrow their human masters.
The play was a sensation in Europe, and then a year later, in America, though something was lost in translation. Čapek used robots to criticize soulless Fordism—the “standardization and regimentation” of American capitalism—and hence the US’s political and cultural power in Europe and around the world. (Other Europeans would conceive of the robot in the same way, notably director Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou in the 1927 German film Metropolis.)
But a funny thing happened to these robotic symbols of American capitalism by the mid-twentieth century. They were Americanized by American capitalism. Americans, as Abnet notes, “turned a figure that initially rebelled against the dehumanizing effects of Fordism into a tamed electro-mechanical slave holding aloft a global empire of consumerism.”
Nowhere was this more literal than in the Westinghouse Electric Company’s “simple remotely controlled mechanical men and women” used to advertise the company’s products from 1927 to 1940. “Technology did not have to run amok, Westinghouse’s robots suggested; it could instead become a tamed slave that empowered each individual consumer to become his or her own master.” In the American context, where the language of master and slave was rooted in racism, Westinghouse “connected robots to romanticized white myths about slavery.”
“Americans had always racialized robot-like creations,” continues Abnet, citing the first American automaton (a caricature of a Native American) and the “grotesque minstrel-like caricatures of Black and Asian bodies” that made up automatons in the late nineteenth century.
Westinghouse’s creations, named Herbert Televox, Karina Van Televox, Telelux, Rastus, Willie Vocalite, and Elektro, were promoted as docile domestic workers. Abnet quotes the New York Times’ science and technology editor extolling the benefits of the first of these “mechanical slaves” in 1927: “it obeys without the usual human arguing, impudence or procrastination.”
Rastus, Westinghouse’s Great Depression-era robot, was the most overtly racialized of these corporate robot slaves. Rastus was modeled on a minstrel show character: “black rubber ‘skin,’ overalls, a white shirt, and a pail hat.” In addition, “the robot had a ‘rich, baritone voice’ that would have been read as unmistakably black.” While “all of Westinghouse’s other robots told jokes…Rastus and its blackness were themselves the joke.”
In 1930, Westinghouse’s President explicitly expressed the prevailing white romanticism of slavery. In the company’s Electric Journal, he argued that without the exploitation of the “muscles of others,” there could be “no art, literature, science, leisure, or comfort for anyone.” Rastus’s “tamed black body,” stresses Abnet, “underscored the larger rhetoric of slavery that shaped the fantasy the company offered white consumers.”
“Ultimately, Westinghouse’s robots were not just about more efficiently accomplishing work or ensuring greater leisure time; they were a symbol that deployed racialized slavery in ways that could reassure white Americans of their own freedom, their own mastery over both technology and the bodies of others.”
Čapek’s robots had successfully rebelled, killing all but one human. In America, that couldn’t happen, at least according to the corporations selling the robot idea. But fear of a robot rebellion, like the fear of slave rebellion before the Civil War, remained. Abnet notes that the “most common robot story in American science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s told a story of white men, using their cunning, strength, and willpower to restore their authority over the robots who should be their slaves.” Movies, especially science fiction serials, often told the same story.
A century after R.U.R. and forty years after The Terminator, the uneasiness engendered by robots (and their droid, cyborg, replicant, and AI cousins) persists, reflecting longstanding concerns about labor, autonomy, and power…
Early automatons in the US evolved from symbols of revolt into racialized figures tied to labor and the legacy of slavery: “How America Racialized the Robot,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
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As we move on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Aretha Franklin’s up-tempo cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” enter the Billboard Hot 100. It rose steadily over the next several weeks, hitting #1 in June, where it stayed for two weeks and won Franklin two Grammy Awards at the 1968 ceremony, including the first of eight consecutive Grammys for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. An R&B classic, it has also become a protest anthem, thanks to its connections to both the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s.
“What’s for breakfast?”*…
… and, we moderns tend to ask, how can we make it faster and easier?… a tendency lampooned, a la Rube Goldberg, in Aardman‘s Classic Wallace and Gromit outing The Wrong Trousers:
Joseph Herscher, proprietor of the wonderful Joseph’s Machines, put the concept to test: he built it…
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers was a favourite of mine growing up, so this machine has been extra special to create! This video not only contains TWO different versions of the final result, but I also take you through my process of figuring out dangerous stunts, solving sticky jam complications and treating dog stage fright. Fun fact: The trousers at the very end were lent to me by Aardman Studios!
Modernizing the most important meal of the day: “Joseph’s Machines recreates Wallace & Gromit’s automated breakfast machine,” via the terrific The Kids Should See This.
* “When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.”
– A. A. Milne
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As we ponder progress, we might recall that today is National Quiche Lorraine Day.
“I have spread my dreams under your feet”*…
From Brian Potter, a fascinating look at the history of a technology, tunnel boring, the products of which we tend to take for granted…
Tunneling is an important technology for modern civilization, as a tunnel is often the only reasonable way to create a direct path between two points. When the Hoosac tunnel was completed in 1875, it turned a difficult, 20-mile railroad route along “precipitous grades” into a direct 5 mile route, connecting Boston with the Upper Hudson Valley. Large infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric dams often require tunnels to function. The Hoover Dam required more than 3 miles of tunnels 56 feet in diameter to divert the Colorado River around the construction site. And a tunnel can be used to create new land beneath dense urban areas, making it possible to build large-scale horizontal infrastructure like sewers or mass transit that wouldn’t be feasible to build above ground.
A common way of building a tunnel today is with a tunnel boring machine (TBM), particularly in urban areas where other construction methods such as drill-and-blast or cut-and-cover would be too disruptive. Of the 89 transit projects around the world that required tunneling in a dataset compiled by Britain Remade, 80 of them used TBMs. But tunnel boring machines are a comparatively modern construction technology. The first successful rock tunneling machines weren’t invented until the 1950s, and into the late 1960s most tunneling was done using other construction methods. But as TBMs have improved, they have increasingly been the method of choice for tunneling through a wider variety of ground conditions. And while many construction tasks have resisted automation and mechanization, tunneling machinery has steadily gotten more automated, to the point where a modern TBM is akin to a mobile factory that burrows through the earth and constructs a tunnel behind it.
…
Soft ground TBMs evolved from unmechanized tunnel shields. The first tunnel shield [see illustration above] was designed by Marc Brunel, father of famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and an accomplished engineer in his own right, and built by Henry Maudslay for tunneling under the Thames in 1825. Brunel’s shield, which was inspired by the action of shipworms boring through the wood hulls of ships, consisted of a large cast-iron structure, 38 feet wide by 22 feet tall, which was broken into 12 separate “frames,” each consisting of three individual compartments stacked on top of another. Within each compartment was a series of horizontal boards, called “poling boards,” that were placed against the face of the tunnel. A worker in the compartment would remove a board, dig out the earth behind it to a depth of around 6 inches, and then proceed to the next board. Once all the soil behind the boards in a frame had been dug out, that section of the shield would be advanced forward using screw jacks, and the process would repeat. Behind the shield, masons would construct the brick lining around the sides of the tunnel, which prevented the tunnel from collapsing and provided a structure for the shield to push off against.
When the Thames Tunnel was completed, it was the first tunnel under a body of water in the world. But the project proved to be incredibly difficult, encountering “almost overwhelming problems” (West p115). Excavation was slow, advancing at around 8 feet per week on average, and the tunnel flooded repeatedly. Gas occasionally filled the tunnel, which caused “collapse and blindness of the workmen” (West p109), and at one point the entire shield needed to be replaced. The tunnel wasn’t completed until 1843, 18 years after it was started, and it was never a commercial success, though it is still in use today. Tunneling via shield wasn’t tried again for over 25 years…
[But it was tried again… and again, and again, being improved and enhanced each time. Potter describes (and illustrates) the steady mechanization of the process– up to and including The Boring Company]
… The arc of tunnel boring machinery looks much more like the progression we see in other industrial areas, and that we don’t often see in construction. Construction operations often remain craft-based and labor intensive, and have been performed in similar ways for decades (or centuries). With tunnel boring machines, we see gradual automation and “factoryization,” where the work increasingly takes place in a highly mechanized, factory-like environment. New technology comes along and displaces the old technology, even in an environment of high risk aversion. And the process gradually converges on the “continuous flow,” where the machine continuously transforms solid ground into a lined tunnel, and continuously removes excavated material with the use of conveyors, the same sort of development we see in things like Ford’s assembly line, chemical process industries, and the Toyota production system.
“The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines,” from @_brianpotter.
* W. B. Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
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As we go deep, we might recall that it was on this date in 2017 that work on the Ryfast Tunnel, connecting the Norwegian city of Stavenger with the the village of Tau on the other side of the fjord, entered its final stage. It became the longest undersea road tunnel in the world; its 8.9 mile length was greater than the Eysturoyartunnilin in the Faroe Islands (at 7.0 miles), the Tokyo Bay Tunnel in Japan (at 6.0 miles), and the Shanghai Yangtze River Tunnel (at 5.6 miles) in China. It is also currently the world’s deepest subsea tunnel, reaching a maximum depth of 958 ft below sea level.
“Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical”*…
From a December, 1969 episode of the BBC series Tomorrow’s World, an eerily-prescient look at the computerized future of banking…
The emergence of the debit card, the impact on back-office jobs, the receding importance of branch banks… they nailed it.
TotH to Benedict Evans (@benedictevans)
* “Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what has happened; predictions are explanations about what’s going to happen.” – John Searle
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As we find our ways into the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that the modern music business was effectively born: Thomas Edison was awarded U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for his invention, the phonograph.
“Not with a bang, but a whimper”*…
What actually happens to workers when a company deploys automation? The common assumption seems to be that the employee simply disappears wholesale, replaced one-for-one with an AI interface or an array of mechanized arms.
Yet given the extensive punditeering, handwringing, and stump-speeching around the “robots are coming for our jobs” phenomenon—which I will never miss an opportunity to point out is falsely represented—research into what happens to the individual worker remains relatively thin. Studies have attempted to monitor the impact of automation on wages on aggregate or to correlate employment to levels of robotization.
But few in-depth investigations have been made into what happens to each worker after their companies roll out automation initiatives. Earlier this year, though, a paper authored by economists James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, and Wiljan Van den Berge set out to do exactly that…
What emerges is a portrait of workplace automation that is ominous in a less dramatic manner than we’re typically made to understand. For one thing, there is no ‘robot apocalypse’, even after a major corporate automation event. Unlike mass layoffs, automation does not appear to immediately and directly send workers packing en masse.
Instead, automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies—whether they’re fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit—and causes a long-term loss of wages for the employee.
The report finds that “firm-level automation increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of 11 percent of one year’s earnings.” That’s a pretty significant loss.
Worse still, the study found that even in the Netherlands, which has a comparatively generous social safety net to, say, the United States, workers were only able to offset a fraction of those losses with benefits provided by the state. Older workers, meanwhile, were more likely to retire early—deprived of years of income they may have been counting on.
Interestingly, the effects of automation were felt similarly through all manner of company—small, large, industrial, services-oriented, and so on. The study covered all non-finance sector firms, and found that worker separation and income loss were “quite pervasive across worker types, firm sizes and sectors.”
Automation, in other words, forces a more pervasive, slower-acting and much less visible phenomenon than the robots-are-eating-our-jobs talk is preparing us for…
The result, Bessen says, is an added strain on the social safety net that it is currently woefully unprepared to handle. As more and more firms join the automation goldrush—a 2018 McKinsey survey of 1,300 companies worldwide found that three-quarters of them had either begun to automate business processes or planned to do so next year—the number of workers forced out of firms seems likely to tick up, or at least hold steady. What is unlikely to happen, per this research, is an automation-driven mass exodus of jobs.
This is a double-edged sword: While it’s obviously good that thousands of workers are unlikely to be fired in one fell swoop when a process is automated at a corporation, it also means the pain of automation is distributed in smaller, more personalized doses, and thus less likely to prompt any sort of urgent public response. If an entire Amazon warehouse were suddenly automated, it might spur policymakers to try to address the issue; if automation has been slowly hurting us for years, it’s harder to rally support for stemming the pain…
Brian Merchant on the ironic challenge of addressing the slow-motion, trickle-down social, economic, and cultural threats of automation– that they will accrue gradually, like erosion, not catastrophically… making it harder to generate a sense of urgency around creating a response: “There’s an Automation Crisis Underway Right Now, It’s Just Mostly Invisible.”
* T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
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As we think systemically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that Ken McCarthy, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Graham held the first conference to focus on the commercial potential of the World Wide Web.
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