Last week, following widespread protests across the U.S., Ed Rensi, a former McDonald’s CEO, said that increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour would result in businesses concluding that it’s time to replace their human staff with robots.

“You’re gonna see a job loss like you can’t believe,” said Rensi, adding that when attending the National Restaurant Show he’d seen robotic devices more than worthy of being employed, or deployed, at a fast food restaurant.

“It’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee whose inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries,” said a seemingly flustered Rensi.

While the robot invasion might be somewhat hyped, automation will very likely lead to a profound change in how businesses operate, and at the same time, due to the loss of millions of jobs, perhaps a paradigm shift in how we actually live. What will happen to the labor force when there are no buttons for us to push or burgers to flip? Jobs such as these are seen as “vulnerable” to automation, but they also account for a large percentage of the workforce. The fast food industry alone employs millions of people just in the U.S., but industry leaders agree that due to rising labor costs, much of the flesh working at an outlet will be replaced with new workers that have nothing but chips for brains.

Jobs to die for

We saw an outstanding example of the emergence of automation this month when Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, announced that it was replacing 60,000 humans with robots. The robots would mostly be performing what had previously been “repetitive” jobs, according to Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, while remaining employees would begin to have, “higher value-added elements in the manufacturing process, such as research and development, process control and quality control.” Yulian also said that he believes more companies will soon be following suit.

Foxconn had in the past come under scrutiny after a string of suicides happened at one of their factories. This led the company to erect safety nets to prevent workers from jumping over balconies, or at least hitting the floor if they made the leap. While Foxconn’s motivation to replace humans with robots was undoubtedly the bottom line, their decision to go robotic in certain areas might have taken out some jobs that made people very unhappy.

In spite of the loss of employment for many workers we might agree that mundane, repetitive, depressing work would be better done by a machine. We should be glad such advances in technology exist – maybe Foxconn can now take down the safety nets – but we must also be aware that 60,000 people might now be in a state of financial and emotional crisis.

Robots as the safety net

Employment that is so unfulfilling that it makes you want to die is not a good thing; flipping burgers even, might not lead to that Aristotelian idea of the Good Life. Humans need to be creative, they need to flourish, said the Greek philosopher, and perhaps the rise of the robots might help attenuate some of the drudgery of modern working life and help us flourish in other ambitions.

Sticking with philosophy we can invoke Karl Marx, who was well aware that automation was the very foundation of future capitalism. If you can produce more things, for less money, with less effort, then a business obviously will do that. If McDonald’s robotic arms, which don’t require holidays, or healthcare, have never felt intense hatred towards their sexist boss or broken an ankle slipping on a mislaid chicken nugget, are faster and better at their job than humans, then McDonald’s would be foolish not to use them.

Marx said this: “The increase of the productive force of labor and the greatest possible negation of necessary labor is the necessary tendency of capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means of labor into machinery is the realization of this tendency.”

Only now does it look like this transformation of labor is going to move faster than we’ve seen since the industrial revolution. We are currently on the brink of a technological revolution in which deep learning can produce a machine to perform a task that heretofore only a human, or perhaps a very intelligent chimpanzee, was capable of performing.

Changing-up The Game

McDonald’s might prosper from this, and of course whoever owns the technological apparatus or patents will prosper, but what are we going to do with all the unemployed people? A report by Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology states that almost half of American jobs will be taken by robots in the next two decades, starting with the most vulnerable jobs as we are now seeing, such as production labor, transportation, logistics, administrative support, and later, if A.I. improves the way some people predict it will, management positions and engineering, among other more skilled jobs.

Marx believed that that the rise of such automation would lead to our “emancipation”, humans freed from soul-crushing or merely back-breaking monotonous labor. Although, Marx believed the rise of the machines would be the significant factor in the end of capitalism. A swift descent into mass global unemployment might not necessarily be the beginning of a time of widespread flourishing and social harmony, as Marx believed would happen, in the next cycle of what he called Communism. Capitalism isn’t going anywhere soon, but the transformation of labor is verily on its way. The game is changing, and we must figure out how to adapt to these changes.

“I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn’t attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that,” David Simon, creator of the series The Wire, once said. Much of Simon’s body of work has been a deconstruction of poverty, and a criticism of systems that are in place that propagate that poverty.

How do we offset negative consequences of mass unemployment due to automation?

Earlier this year, Sir Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel prize-winning economist and the Regius professor at London School of Economics, spoke at the World Economic Forum. There he stated that Universal Basic Income (UBI) should be taken seriously as we enter this new era of automation and mass human unemployment.

“We need to develop a new system of redistributions, new policies that will redistribute inevitably from those that the market would have rewarded in favor of those that the market would have left behind. Now, having a universal minimum income is one of those ways, in fact, it is one I am very much in favor of, as long as we know how to apply it without taking away incentive to work at the lower end of the market.”

If our worth as labor is devalued because of machines, to the extent of the possibility of pervasive crippling poverty and a mega-rich minority, surely we must come up with a solution, lest society becomes more fractured and the general standard of living vastly depreciated.

It’s been said that with UBI we might want to detach our work and income, honing our creativity when our basic needs are met. This might sound overly-idealistic, and there are many arguments for and against UBI – economic infeasibility being the most common detractor.

Here’s one (the conclusion) for UBI, from a Forbes story:

“The thing that would strengthen workers’ bargaining power the most would be the introduction of a universal basic income. This would raise the reservation wage considerably: it would mean that employers have to pay significantly higher wages in order to persuade people to come in and do some work. Something like the level suggested by Charles Murray [political scientist, libertarian author],would do very well. An unconditional $10,000 a year to every adult American.”

Murray’s paper, called ‘Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State’, states that such an income could work as a coalition between the left and right in the U.S. “For the Left, it represents larger government in that it constitutes a state-driven redistribution of wealth, while for the Right, it offers smaller government in terms of the state’s power to control people’s lives.”

The paper is not based on automation, but more a reasoning behind UBI (GI: Guaranteed Income) to create more social harmony, security for the aged, a way to address crime, a solution to the learned helplessness of the underclass. He also believes it will be cheaper than welfare, partly because it will get rid of countless administrators and bureaucrats that will no longer be needed.

The obvious criticism about basic income is that people will just not work, they will collect their money and completely shy away from labor. Murray’s counter to this is that the welfare state is entirely disabling, “stripping the institutions of family and community of many of their functions and responsibilities”, while GI would empower people and help them be competitive in the labor market. It would get them on their feet, enrich their lives, and help dissipate feelings of disenfranchisement that permeates the poorest parts of society.

Doing what you love

Back to the future and the possibility of mass unemployment due to automation one advocate of UBI, Scott Santens, argues, “The fact we require jobs to exist, because it is only through jobs that we can presently obtain income, means that there are jobs we can eliminate right now, but we instead allow them to exist and even make more of them. Think of all the jobs out there that don’t need to exist, and what that means to human progress.”

Can great minds, embattled by a hard workload and little free time, be left mostly untapped? Could our robots release us from oppressive labor, and UBI help us to maintain not just dignity but a level of creative intelligence that might never have seen the light of day under the duress of a begrudged 50-hour work week? What hidden potential lies in people doing what could be unnecessary work?

Santens writes, “A society full of people who can voluntarily choose their work, who can choose to start their own businesses, who can make their ideas into reality, that’s the kind of society we want, and that’s what’s possible through universal basic income.”

In the words of British philosopher Alan Watts, do what you love and you will become a master of it… The money will follow. Watts could not have been aware of our current splash into automation, but his values pertaining to doing what you love some people think are achievable given our growing army of robot helpers.

Not surprisingly there is some amount of fear as we head into this future of more advanced technology, but that fear probably stems from the fact the state-of-the-way-things-are doesn’t encourage us to believe that people at the top of the economic hierarchy are working for the greater good. We are living in a cynical era, an era in which the neologism “truthiness” became part of our vocabulary. But with the right will pushing it along, maybe this technology could drive us closer to that Good Life Aristotle talked about. Automation x Basic Income = a more pleasurable existence for the majority, might be a rose-tinted view of things, but still, it deserves our curiosity. Mass global unemployment and greater wealth disparity, without contingencies to remedy the consequences of that, doesn’t bear thinking about.

Photo credit: Generation Grundeinkommen via Flickr