The robots are coming and will terminate your jobs
In future, there may be people who – despite being fit to work – have no economic value
On August 29 1997, Skynet – a computer system controlling the US nuclear arsenal – became self-aware. Panicking operators tried to deactivate it. Skynet, perceiving the threat, launched its arsenal, killed most of humanity, and ushered in a world in which the robots ruled. So went the backstory of the 1984 movie The Terminator . But computers did not become self-aware in 1997 – the closest they managed was when Deep Blue, a B-list supercomputer, beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion. Despite decades of hand-wringing about robots taking over, the robots never quite seem to rise.
But perhaps 2014 will be different. Google certainly seems to think so: early in December it purchased Boston Dynamics, a producer of military prototype robots – with names such as “BigDog”, “WildCat” or “Petman” – that wouldn’t look out of place in the Terminator films. These nightmarish machines will now be brought to you by the folks who host all your email, know what your internet searches are and are tracking your phone’s location.
But while the Skynet-esque combination of Google and Boston Dynamics is unsettling, it is not in itself a reason to expect that robot technologies really will change the world. Yet the talk in the economics profession is increasingly taking that possibility seriously.
The primary cause has been with us a long time: the familiar Moore’s law, which in various guises describes growth in computing power as swift and exponential. We have got used to swift growth, but we can never quite get used to the implications of exponential growth – meaning that whatever has just happened will be eclipsed by whatever is just about to happen.
Moore’s law, loosely applied, is that computers today are twice as powerful as the computers of two years ago, perhaps just 18 months ago. Today’s mobile phone is a match for what was once a cutting-edge gaming console; that gaming console, in turn, outperforms the kind of old-timey supercomputer that the Terminator franchise once imagined taking over the world.
Software is also becoming more efficient. We tend to miss this because the bloated copies of Microsoft Word we use do not seem faster than 20 years ago. But a mobile phone running Pocket Fritz 4, a chess program, can now beat grandmasters, despite the phone running far more slowly than Deep Blue did. A chess-playing phone is not about to lead a robot uprising, so why should we care? A growing number of economists – including Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in a new book
