It’s Time to Lose the Luddites

A ‘robot tax’ would do nothing more than derail almost limitless growth and a high standard of living

Thu, 10/21/2021 - 12:03

Luddism is, as depicted by Henry Ford, “...the theory that there is only so much work in the world to do and it must be strung out.”1 This dysfunctional paradigm is shared today by otherwise highly capable people such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, while former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for a “robot tax” on employers who introduce automation. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang has called for a universal basic income (UBI) to compensate for jobs lost to automation.2

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These proposals can, if taken seriously and acted upon, do nothing more than derail almost limitless growth and a high standard of living for all Americans. They are, in fact, just variations on Luddism as depicted in a song for the Children’s BBC series Horrible Histories. It begins, “We were weavers highly skilled ‘till things were mechanized...” and goes on to describe how machines purportedly displaced workers. The result was a revolution in which the Luddites smashed the machines in question; robot taxes are simply a nonviolent modification of machine-breaking.

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Comments

Submitted by Dirk van Putten (not verified) on Thu, 10/21/2021 - 09:30

I do not read Quality Digest for political opinions. 

Submitted by Rip Stauffer on Thu, 10/21/2021 - 12:21

This does strike me as having political overtones...while probably relevant to business in general for this venue some ties to quality would be good...Deming used to say something very close to, "The factory of the future will contain two living beings, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog; the dog will be there to keep the man from tampering with the machinery." So there's maybe a tenuous tie...

The underlying issues (manufacturing and economics) are nonpartisan, apolitical, and impartial laws of science and economics. It is the often misguided reactions to them that become political in nature. The difference is clear in Rudyard Kipling's The Gods of the Copybook Headings, which represent these nonpartisan and impartial laws that govern everything. Kipling's "Gods of the Market Place" relate, on the other hand, to popular ideas as to how we can get something for nothing, including but not limited to political "fixes."

Automation and efficiency improvements have similarly had dysfunctional political repurcussions for hundreds of years as discussed in the article, with even the Queen of England refusing to issue a patent for a knitting machine in the late 16th century and people arguing for "robot taxes" and universal basic incomes today. All three relate to what Kipling would call the Gods of the Market Place (i.e. restrict automation to preserve jobs) while the Gods of the Copybook Headings say that automation and efficiency offer a high standard of living for everybody.

Another example consists of green energy mandates. I read today that there is a massive energy shortage in Europe because there is less wind available, and the wind turbines that everybody said would displace fossil fuels don't run without wind. Wishful thinking ("wind turbines will deliver green energy") does not unfortunately carry over into reality and Kipling pointed this out more than 100 years ago. I regard wind turbines as a useful adjunct to fossil fuels because they deliver emission-free energy when they work, but they are clearly not a reliable replacement for fossil fuels.

Kipling (and Henry Ford) says we must work with the nonpartisan and impartial laws of science, economics, and human behavior (a square deal for all stakeholders) because, when we try to circumvent these laws as depicted in Kipling's poem, it rarely works out well.

Yes, it's unfortunate that that's the world we live in today. Vaccines and masks have somehow become political statements in the midst of a pandemic that has killed over 700,000 Americans. So if you publish an article that sounds as though it's shot through the lens of an Adam Smith/Milton Friedman/Chicago School economic theory, it tends to sound conservative, which in these times makes it sound "political."

I enjoyed reading this, and while I don't see your article as inherently political in nature I don't think I agree with some of your conclusions, either; they seem overly optimistic to me. In most American companies today, if you can put in a machine that does the work of 10 people then the company tends to fire those 10 people. It's really not difficult to envision an inflection point where automation does more and more of the labor, and there are fewer and fewer jobs for humans to go around. If we ever hit the singularity and AI becomes just "I," and machines don't need us to learn anymore, then what? 

This is hard for me, because I have spent a lot of years trying to optimize production systems, and it's bothered me that sometimes a process improvement project has eliminated jobs, because it's now a much more efficient process. I have been told by union members that they didn't want me there because every time one of us (quality improvement professionals) showed up, some jobs went away. They saw Quality as another strategy by the company to cut head count. 

If management eliminated jobs in response to better productivity, it did exactly what Ford and Taylor warned against 100 or more years ago with the result, as the union pointed out, they wanted no part of Lean. This is exactly what happened at Ford in the mid-1930s when a new machine was brought in, and workers were fired under flimsy pretexted or pressured into quitting.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 10/21/2021 - 10:05

What, exactly, does this author's Econ 101 essay have to do with maintaining quality standards?

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