But Wouldn’t Robots Take Over?

Man, Economy, and Robot

Economists agree that the accumulation of labor-saving capital is responsible for the great growth of wealth experienced in recent centuries. It has allowed the productivity of the public to soar, which has in turn improved wages and working conditions.

Yet parallel to the phenomenal betterment of the life of the common man have always been vocal cries against the job-destroying machines. The robots, as it goes, are taking our jobs! [1]

It is curious that the opponents of the accumulation of capital are always drawn from the present generations. Many men and women today wax eloquent about the jobs this or that industry will have to shed because the machines are simply better than the humans. However, they hardly decry the capital accumulation of the past. If the machines that are being employed today destroy so many jobs, why not also speak out against and destroy the machines of the past? Instead of only fighting against the greater use of capital in today’s world, why not try to turn the clock back further? Instead of the steam shovel, reach for the old-school shovel. And before grasping it, pick up Milton Friedman’s spoon [2]. Finally, drop it and use your bare hands to dig in the dirt.

“what if robots become so good that they are better than humans at everything?”

Regardless of this logical conclusion, fashionable futurist philosophers of today ask the question “what if robots become so good that they are better than humans at everything? Wouldn’t we all lose our jobs, and hence our livelihoods, while the rich have their corporations run by robots and retain all their profits?”

At first, this appears a daunting critique – after all, without jobs, how will we survive? As the old saying goes, “The rich will get richer and the poor, poorer” [3]. However, upon a closer inspection, these fears turn out to be unfounded.

And then there were none.

The misunderstanding arises because of the failure to see the market as a dynamic, responsive mechanism, but rather as a fixed and machine-like device existing outside the realm of human desires. The situation presented first of all disregards the fact that people use means toward ends. How is this relevant? Because of the fact that businesses produce not merely because of some inner desire to produce stuff, but because they would like to sell said stuff to consumers. As influential classical economist David Ricardo said,

‘No man produces but with a view to consume or sell, and he never sells but with an intention to purchase some other commodity, which may be immediately useful to him, or which may contribute to future production.” (1817)

Instead, the Robot Theory implies that businesses produce for the sake of producing.

Toss the poor out!

Let’s see how the proposed doomsday scenario would play out. Robots become better and better at performing the tasks of man, and they (supposedly) replace humans more and more. This means (supposedly), that more and more people lose their jobs. But for some reason, the businesses continue to produce an ever-increasing amount of goods, because the robots are more efficient. Taken to the limit, the corporations will be made up of only the owners and the robots, while the rest of the masses are poor and jobless. I wonder – why are the businesses then continuing production? If no one can buy their products, why do they continue making them? The proposition that increased automatization will lead to mass unemployment is, therefore, preposterous.

Yet there are other objections to be brought up to this theory. If the robots are so efficient, why does the public not begin employing them as well? Assuming that we have such marvelous technological progress as to make factories completely autonomous, is it not likely that this technology will also, at least on a smaller scale, be available to the masses? If so, then we really enter a stage of utopia instead of disaster – where each man is able to produce what he needs by himself and hence have his material needs satisfied [4]. As economist Walter Block notes,

“[J]obs are nothing but a means toward that end… [I]magine a world where radios, pizzas, jogging shoes, and everything else we might want continuously rained down like manna from heaven. Would we want jobs in such a Utopia? No, we could devote ourselves to other tasks—studying, basking in the sun, etc.—that we would undertake for their intrinsic pleasure.” (1988)

The last desperate objection to be raised to capital accumulation could be “but what will we do when we need not labor to survive?” I propose we worry about that when we get there – we’ll have nothing else to do!

– Wheylous

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Footnotes:

[1] The title of this essay is a play on Robert Murphy’s “But Wouldn’t the Warlords Take Over?”, a great reply to the idea that private defense agencies would wage constant war on the public.

[2] It has been passed down in economic mythology that Milton Friedman went to China and saw that at their digs they were using shovels instead of modern tractors and earth movers. Upon being told that this was to “create jobs,” he shook his head and told them they should be using spoons instead.

[3] Tom Woods addresses this platitude by asking how in the world the poor can, over a long period of time, get ever poorer and poorer. At some point, you have to hit subsistence level, and there’s really nothing more to “steal” from the poor.

[4] To not clutter up the article, I will note here that lastly, one might argue that the robots will work on huge robot plantations to only serve their masters. In this case, it must be recognized that the structure of production will be very different from what it is today – in the current world, companies generally mass-produce goods for which they themselves have no use. It would be difficult to argue that Ford makes all those cars because they just want to own millions of cars. Hence, if said robot plantations exist, then the CEOs must necessarily only be producing for themselves – specific goods, and in limited quantities at that. Assume, then, that all the rich would care for is making jets to fly around the world. In that case, it is true that no people would be hired to work the jet-producing machines. Yet it’s also true that the rich would have no use of the massive amounts of other land and capital that is only useful in providing mass-produced goods such as tooth-brushes, food, toys. Since they would see no value in the land, they would not bother owning the land, which opens it up for the public to use as before, and employment and general welfare exists once again. Of course, it could again be pointed out that even if the rich produce only for themselves, the advances in technology would likely also be available to the masses.

Tagged: automatization, capital, capital accumulation, dystopia, Luddites, machines, robots