The Internet Is Not the Answer (13 page)

Many others share this automation anxiety. The distinguished
Financial Times
economics columnist Martin Wolf warns that intelligent machines could hollow out middle-class jobs, compound income inequality, make the wealthy “indifferent” to the fate of everyone else, and make a “mockery” of democratic citizenship.
²⁰
“The robots are coming and will terminate your jobs,”
²¹
worries the generally cheerful economist Tim Harford in response to Google’s acquisition in December 2013 of Boston Dynamics, a producer of military robots such as Big Dog, a three-foot-long, 240-pound, four-footed beast that can carry a 340-pound load and climb snowy hiking trails. Harford suspects 2014 might be the year that computers finally become self-aware, a prospect that he understandably finds “sobering” because of its “negative impact of . . . on the job market.”
²²
He is particularly concerned with how increasingly intelligent technology is hollowing out middle-income jobs such as typists, clerks, travel agents, and bank tellers.

Equally sobering is the involvement of dominant Internet companies like Google and Amazon in a robot-controlled society that the technology writer Nicholas Carr foresees in his 2014 book about “automation and us,”
The Glass Cage
. Carr’s earlier 2008 work,
The Big Switch
,
made the important argument that, with the increasingly ubiquity of cloud computing, the network has indeed become a giant computer, with the World Wide Web thus being “The World Wide Computer.”
²³
And with automation, Carr warns in
The Glass Cage
, the World Wide Computer is now designing a society that threatens to discard human beings.

“The prevailing methods of computerized communication pretty much ensure that the role of people will go on shrinking,” Carr writes in
The Glass Cage
. “Society is reshaping itself to fit the contours of the new computing infrastructure. The infrastructure orchestrates the instantaneous data exchanges that make fleets of self-driving cars and armies of killer robots possible. It provides the raw materials for the predictive algorithms that inform the decisions of individuals and groups. It underpins the automation of classrooms, libraries, hospitals, shops, churches, and homes.”
²⁴

With its massive investment in the development of intelligent labor-saving technologies like self-driving cars and killer robots, Google—which has imported Ray Kurzweil, the controversial evangelist of “singularity,” to direct its artificial intelligence engineering strategy
²⁵
—is already invested in the building and management of the glass cage. Not content with the acquisition of Boston Dynamics and seven other robotics companies in the second half of 2013,
²⁶
Google also made two important purchases at the beginning of 2014 to consolidate its lead in this market. It acquired the secretive British company DeepMind, “the last large independent company with a strong focus on artificial intelligence,” according to one inside source, for $500 million; and it bought Nest Labs, a leader in smart home devices such as intelligent thermostats, for $3.23 billion. According to the
Wall Street Journal
, Google is even working with Foxconn, the huge Taiwanese contract manufacturer that already makes most of Apple’s products, “to carry out the US company’s vision for robotics.”
²⁷
With all these acquisitions and partnerships, Google clearly is, as the technology journalist Dan Rowinski put it, playing a game of Moneyball
²⁸
in the age of artificial intelligence—setting itself up to be the dominant player in the age of intelligent computing. In the future, then, the origins of that deadly tornado “coming to an office near you” will probably lie in the Googleplex, Google’s global headquarters in Mountain View, California, where the automated data feedback loop of Sergey Brin’s “big circle” is coming to encircle more and more of society.

And then there’s Google’s interest in Travis Kalanick’s Uber—another play that may turn out to be a massive job killer. In 2013, Google Ventures invested $258 million in Uber, the largest ever outside investment by Google’s venture arm. It’s not hard to figure out why. As the
Forbes
columnist Chunka Mui suggests: “Google Car + Uber = Killer App.”
²⁹
And as T. J. McCue, Mui’s colleague at
Forbes
, adds, Google’s interest in Uber may lie in Kalanick’s transportation network becoming the infrastructure for a revolutionary drone delivery service. Google could, in the not too distant future, take on UPS, FedEx, DHL, and postal services and replace the jobs of hundreds of thousands of delivery drivers and mail carriers around the world with networked drones. Given that UPS and FedEx alone employed almost 700,000 people in 2013,
³⁰
the impact of this drone revolution on middle-class jobs threatens to be particularly corrosive. “FedEx needs Amazon more than Amazon needs FedEx,” the
New York Times
’ Claire Cain Miller notes about Amazon’s ability to negotiate its own special rates with FedEx.
³¹
And this power asymmetry will become increasingly pronounced as Amazon develops technology and services that directly compete with independent delivery services like FedEx and UPS.

For some, the idea of automatic drones replacing UPS and FedEx drivers is a science fictional fantasy, more suited to 2114 than 2014. But not for Jeff Bezos, another early investor in Uber. In a December 2013 interview with Charlie Rose on the CBS News show
60 Minutes
, Bezos actually floated the idea of deploying drones to deliver packages. Calling this service “Prime Air,” Bezos said, “I know this looks like science fiction. It’s not.”
³²
And just as Amazon may one day go robot-to-robot with Google in the delivery drone business, it is also competing with Google in the war of the one percent to eliminate the jobs of everyone else in our economy. In July 2014, Amazon even wrote to the US Federal Aviation Administration asking for permission to test Prime Air. The delivery drones could travel at up to 50 miles an hour and deliver packages of up to 2.3 kilograms.
³³

The Amazon theater of this automation war is as strategically significant as the Google front. Yes, Amazon may be hiring low-income, hourly, nonunionized laborers for its rapidly growing number of warehouses. But, like Google, Amazon is also massively investing in automated labor technology, with Jeff Bezos telling his investors in May 2014 that he expected to be using 10,000 robots in its fulfillment centers by the beginning of 2015.
³⁴
Thus in 2012 Amazon paid $775 million for Kiva Systems, a maker of robots for servicing warehouses. Kiva robots—which, by the way, are already being used by the Amazon-owned online shoe store Zappos (in Zappos’s hierarchy-free holacracy, all robots are presumably equal)—can retrieve and pick 200–400 items an hour. As George Packer warns in a 2014
New Yorker
piece, “Amazon’s warehouse jobs are gradually being taken over by robots.” The chilling end result, Packer forecasts, is that Amazon will have “eliminated the human factor from shopping, and we will finally be all alone with our purchases.”
³⁵
The Everything Store is, in truth, turning out to be the nobody store. It’s an automated echo chamber—a store in which we are surrounded by algorithmic mirrors and all we see are our own buying histories. The algorithm knows what we want before we enter the store and then a robot fulfills our order, which, if Jeff Bezos has his way, will be delivered by our own personalized drone.

Like Google and Amazon, Facebook is also aggressively entering the artificial intelligence business. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a virtual reality company, and British-based pilotless drone company Ascenta.
³⁶
Mark Zuckerberg has also co-invested with Tesla Motors’s CEO Elon Musk and the Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher in an artificial intelligence company called Vicarious, which mimics human learning. According to its founder, Scott Phoenix, Vicarious’s goal is to replicate the neocortex, thus creating a “computer that thinks like a person . . . except that it doesn’t have to sleep.”
³⁷
Phoenix told the
Wall Street Journal
that Vicarious will eventually “learn how to cure diseases, create cheap renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings.”
³⁸
What Phoenix didn’t clarify, however, is what exactly human beings will do with themselves all day when every job is performed by Vicarious.

The threat of artificial intelligence to jobs is becoming such a huge problem that even Eric Schmidt, Google’s normally glib executive chairman, now acknowledges its seriousness. “The race between computers and people,” Schmidt declared at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos, will be the “defining one” in the world economy over the next twenty-five years.
³⁹
And “people need to win,” he said. But given their massive investment in artificial intelligence, can we really trust Google to be on our side in this race between computers and people over the next quarter century? If we “win” this race, won’t that mean Google—having invested in artificial intelligence companies like Boston Dynamics, Nest Labs, and Deep Mind—will have
lost
?

Rather than focusing on “winning,” our networked automation anxiety is really all about identifying the losers, the people who will lose their jobs, the failures in our networked economy. Citing a paper by Oxford University’s Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne that predicts that 47% of all American jobs might be lost in the next couple of decades,
⁴⁰
the
Atlantic
’s Derek Thompson speculates on “which half” of the workforce could be made redundant by robots. Of the ten jobs that have a 99% likelihood of being replaced by networked software and automation over the next quarter century, Thompson includes tax preparers, library technicians, telemarketers, sewers in clothing factories, accounts clerks, and photographic process workers.
⁴¹

While it’s all very well to speculate about who will lose their jobs because of automation, Thompson says, “the truth is scarier. We don’t have a clue.”
⁴²

But Thompson is wrong. The writing is on the wall about both the winners and the losers in this dehumanizing race between computers and people. We do indeed have more than a clue about its outcome. And that’s what really is scary.

The Writing on the Wall

Not everything about our automation anxiety is speculative. Indeed, when it comes to photographic process workers, there’s a 100% certainty that they lost the race with computers for jobs. That was why I had come to Snapshot City. Rather than speculating about the destruction of tomorrow’s jobs, I’d flown into Rochester to understand how networked technology is killing today’s jobs.

I’d begun my search for Kodak’s remains earlier that morning at Visit Rochester, a run-down building at ground zero of the city’s decimated downtown, on the corner of Main and East Streets, where I did, at least, manage to find a live person.

“Could you tell me where I can find the Kodak offices?” I asked the gray-haired old lady, who was volunteering her labor at the center. Judging by the distraught look on the kindly woman’s face, I might have brought up a recent family bereavement. Perhaps I had. Her husband, she told me, had worked at Kodak for more than forty years. “A lifer,” she called him, ruefully shaking her head. I wondered if he was one of the fifty thousand retirees who’d lost all his benefits after the bankruptcy.

The woman unfolded a map of Rochester and spread it on the counter between us. But rather than a local geography lesson, she gave me an introduction to her city’s troubled history. “Well, there used to be a factory here and labs here and here,” she said, not bothering to veil her nostalgia for a city that no longer existed. “And here, and here, too.

“But now,” she added, lowering her voice, “now, I’m not so sure.”

Twenty-five years ago, of course, it would have been a quite different story. In 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee made his revolutionary breakthrough at CERN, Eastman Kodak employed 145,000 people in research laboratories, offices, and factories all over Rochester. Even in the mid-nineties, the publicly traded company had a market value of more than $31 billion. Since then, however, Kodak’s decline has been even more precipitous than that of the global recorded music industry.

The paradox is that Kodak has been a victim of abundance rather than scarcity. The more ubiquitous online photo sharing has become, the easier it’s become to take pictures from our smartphones and tablets, the less anyone has needed Kodak. “You press the button, we do the rest,” George Eastman famously boasted. But the digital revolution has made photography so easy that there is no longer any
rest
to
do
. And so, between 2003 and 2012—the age of multibillion-dollar Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram—Kodak closed thirteen factories and 130 photo labs and cut 47,000 jobs in a failed attempt to turn the company around.
⁴³
And then, having emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2013, Kodak committed suicide to avoid being murdered. Trying to reinvent itself as a “commercial imaging company serving business markets like packaging and graphics,”
⁴⁴
Kodak got out of the consumer picture business entirely. It was as if Kleenex suddenly stopped selling tissues or Coca-Cola withdrew overnight from the fizzy drinks business. Kodak sold its online photo-sharing site and its portfolio of digital imaging patents—what the
New York Times
described as its “crown jewel”
⁴⁵
—to Silicon Valley vultures like Apple, Facebook, and Google that were eager to pick over the carcass.
⁴⁶
After all these self-inflicted cuts, there wasn’t much left of the company. By October 2013, only 8,500 people worked for Kodak.
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The game was up. Kodak was dead.