Baxter is a friendly little robot. Baxter can learn how to do any number of menial tasks, which are now performed by low-paid, low-skilled workers. He's so easy to program that all you have to do is grab him by his arm and direct him through the task once. If you are a good enough teacher then Baxter will simply do the job that the low-skilled, low-paid worker once did. Heck, the low-paid, low-skilled worker just became a robot programmer.
But that was a one-time stint as a robot programmer, and now the low-paid, low-skilled worker now must find a new job, hopefully not through a temp agency, anything but a temp agency.
Baxter represents one small but important step in the evolution of work. Now, employees are charged with training their human replacements. Soon, employees will be charged with training their robotic replacements. A workforce of robots begs the question of the role of humans in a society that requires humans both to work as a contribution of the society and to collect compensation for that work to enjoy this society's basic needs and its amenities. Perhaps this is the Communist utopia where technology replaces the drudgery of work such that humans can be free to explore their own self-development. That's a scary thought because I sense that the majority of us, if freed of the responsibilities to remain sober and capable of taking orders, will face an existential abyss. For many, a life without work is a life without meaning. We often find ourselves needing a struggle to both give our lives meaning and to preoccupy our minds. A robot will not replace all people and all work; it simply replaces some work and some types of occupations.
Perhaps I am too beholden to the identity work of work. A time existed when whole masses of people organized into workers unions and workers congresses of this or that sort. Through these means many people were able to fight against the capricious hand of capital and its handlers to take what some union members call a 'fair shake.' To see the actions of a union and its sometimes atavistic language one gets at an awareness about power and reality. If you put enough people together you can create a world of your own that persists through time. Labor unions have and continue to be eroded and destroyed by corporate interests, private money interests, and the politicians that represent and speak for them. Robots are one of many assaults upon work as a relationship between knowledge of a craft and the market needs for its products. This robot now only has the opportunity to take away low-skilled, low-pay jobs. It is a matter of time before the development of a more sophisticated robot for more sophisticated tasks.
I am hazy on the details, but I could conceive that the conditions under which manufacturing work was done in Communism's political and philosophical heyday was physically demanding and mentally jejune. To free people of this work would be liberation. But what of craftwork? Perhaps this robot will never be enlisted for such professions. But what of those of us who aren't in a craft or who simply can never find meaningful or financially supportive work may be left in the shadow of these robots.
I see a long-term progression to a time where people will be needed less and less living in a society that they rely upon more and more. Not long ago, perhaps 120 years ago, most people subsisted on their own skills in growing, collecting, and hunting food while they traded what they created, grown, or collected in surplus for what they couldn't create, grow, or collect. That society begat us, who rely upon water, electrical, and gas utilities. We need a car or fare to travel any where. We can't even deliver our own offspring with any success. We've been successively bled of the knowledge of our own survival and that of our species. We are all babes in a modern world, completely powerless. Without the knowledge to survive on our own outside the modern sociotechnical system we are pressed into its service in some fashion. We need a job or we simply need to acquire money to survive. Money can be traded for what keeps us alive. Outside of that system we would have to create a new system based upon our own abilities and our free association with others with whom we deal for personal gain. It's not an impossibility for all, but for many it would lead to one of many outcomes. Becoming an outlaw or becoming a corpse suggest some of the brutish and shorter ones. To avoid these outcomes many of us are loathe to support the system for the sake not only of its survival but ours as well.
Do robots signal a return to two societies: one lived within the confines of the modern sociotechnical apparatus and one lived like Little House on the Prairie? Do robots signal a population decline because people aren't needed nor can be supported to live within the current system? I can only speculate. And I will continue to do so.
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