“It’s not about driving down the cost of labor.” Those are the words of Lorenzo Pautasso, general manager of RobCo’s U.S. office.
Pautasso conveyed them to Farah Stockman of the New York Times. He was making it clear that robots in no way threaten the jobs of existing workers, rather they solidify them.
Henry Ford vivified the above truth with his assembly lines. New hires didn’t take place at the expensive of existing workers, as much as more hands and machines made it possible for Ford to manufacture cars for “the great multitude.” While it’s erroneously said to this day that Ford introduced $5/day pay to create a middle-class market for his eponymous corporation’s automobiles, the real truth was that Ford couldn’t afford to underpay his employees. They were the path to exponentially more cars at lower prices.
It’s worth thinking about in the present as corporations like Amazon invest substantial sums in robotics. To its critics, Amazon’s actions are all about setting the stage for a workforce bereft of humans. The critics have it backwards.
Amazon would never, ever so blithely give up the human capital that it worked so diligently to hire. Good, productive workers are precious.
Stockman intuits what Amazon has long known through various, frequently smaller corporations around the U.S. that are renting nominally expensive robots from individuals like Pautasso. It's not a not-so-veiled attempt by businesses to convince the human element on the job to shape up or ship out, rather it’s loud comment by business owners that the humans who come to work for them each day are incredibly valuable, and more important, they grow more valuable by the day.
The robots aren’t a threat, or an inducement for workers to take pay cuts, as much as they’re an aggressive attempt to keep the human element happily employed. Stockman explains all this very well through the businesses that pay to utilize them.
These powerful, increasingly heavy lifters are happily taking over what are easily the most distasteful aspects of work. Put another way, the robots disdained by critics as evidence of a nefarious plot to force humans into breadlines are actually an expensive, but highly worthwhile effort on the part of businesses large and small to not just recruit workers, but retain them.
Why recruit and retain when the robots and other forms of AI are said to be poised to do 80 percent of the work (Vinod Khosla) formerly done by humans? The easy but crucial answer to the question can be found in the happy truth that machines capable of doing and thinking for humans exponentially increase the value of the humans coming to work each day.
That’s because “economic growth” is but a fancy, wordy substitute for "productivity." Machines don’t replace us, but they do make us much more productive. Which means the rise of robots and AI will take place alongside an even more frenzied pursuit of human capital.
Pautasso brings this happy state of worker affairs to life. Not only did he tell Stockman that robotics aren’t about “driving down the cost of labor,” he followed his initial contention with the essential comment that robots in the workplace are about “ensuring the consistency of labor, that the people that are there today will be there tomorrow.” Henry Ford understood the latter, Amazon is living the latter, and a growing number of businesses we haven’t heard of will live it too as automation boosts human capital to levels of value that will soon enough make the worker of the present appear substantially underpaid by comparison.
