We consider the implications of automation as conservatives. The implications are not limited to job displacement but to the very structure of our economic system and therefore the very existence of our liberties.
The public eternally argues whether automation produces more jobs than it eliminates. If we look at the Industrial Revolution which was a form of automation, it clearly produced more jobs than it cost. The problem was the Industrial Revolution affected farms greatly and made many agricultural workers redundant who flocked to the cities and infested places like London's gin alleys. The social dislocation was brutal and vividly described by Dickens.
But it was not "automation" alone that caused dislocations (a point we might keep in mind in an age of outsourcing), the cloture movement in England and Ireland and the Crofters in Scotland caused huge social dislocations. The Scots emigrated around the world giving us the likes of Carnegie. One can even connect the dots to the Irish potato famine, their migrations not just to America where they produced presidents like Barack Obama but throughout the Empire.
The dislocations, however caused, inevitably produced reactions. Those who cite the virtues of technological advancement cite the reaction of the Luddites as an example of overreaction and misplaced grievance. To destroy the looms being powered by water and later by steam in order to bring back a cottage industry was a futile reaction.
Eventually the Industrial Revolution caught up and provided jobs but the difficulty in human terms was seen in the time lag between redundancy and new industries creating new jobs. Besides the time lag there was also a culture lag. An agricultural worker who kept time by the sun and the seasons was not the sort of fellow to show up to work on time and tie himself to a tedious machine for 12 hours, six days a week. Something to consider when we seek to explain the failures of the Great Society and its training programs to make worker bees in the inner-city. In this context we think of a checkout employee at Walmart and we see a tedious repetitive task, highly automated and intentionally designed by very smart people to be operated as mindlessly as possible by less clever people who are utterly ignorant of the workings of the technology they operate. In fact, the whole idea of this transformation is to discourage individual initiative where the rubber meets the road. Human drones make the best employees in this situation.
In addition to the time lag and the culture lag there is an education lag which is extremely challenging because it is a moving target. As the digital revolution incessantly rolls over it becomes exponentially more sophisticated in bewilderingly short spaces of time, it's new technical skills require new language (literally so in computer programming), new ways of thinking (with the binary system instead of thinking in 10s), a whole new concept of time and space (your x-ray might well be read in real-time by a radiologist in India). The digital revolution requires a difficult to define alteration in conceptual thinking regarding sectors of the economy. Advertising in newspapers is going the way of delivering the mail by pony express. Marketing is now being redefined by social media. Delivery of medical services must now take into account the fact that I can look my symptoms up on the Internet and challenge my doctor's diagnosis, often to his ill-disguised annoyance. Meanwhile, there is a bit of irony which might be appreciated today by Luddites of old when an Englishman's x-ray is read by an Indian doctor, reversing the mercantilist manufacture of garments in England with Indian cotton. Old-fashioned industries are utterly revolutionized by computers: horizontal drilling and fracking in oil recovery; subterranean radar in mining and oil exploration; gene splicing of grains in agriculture, much feared by my neighbors here in Germany-or is theirs merely a protectionist reaction?
Since the object of automating labor is to substitute machines for people at a cost benefit, automation seeks low hanging fruit and is most profitably deployed where it will eliminate the most workers. These workers are human which means they come in many flavors: many will be intelligent but many will not be clever enough to adapt to cyber world; many will be ambitious but many will also be lazy and prone to dependency; many will be fit but many will also be alcoholic and drug dependent; many will be young but many will be old and uneducable; many will be mobile but many will also be tied to the soil or family and unable to pull up stakes to find employment in geographically as well as psychically far removed venues; many will be resilient but many will also be defeatist. We conservatives should never forget that victims as well as survivors of the computer revolution will vote. We should never forget that leftists will pander to the losers and demagogue capitalism for producing technological progress which they will describe as exploitation. They are liable to win this debate because they tend to win debates by controlling the language, co-opting institutions, and with cynical race and class demagoguery. They are liable to win because they are likely to get the government to subsidize their side.
Leftists will be eager to demonize capitalism as the author of dislocation just as they exploit "climate change" to destroy capitalism. The strategy will be to create a class of victims of those left behind to create a political force to impose government controls over the entire economic system. Community organizing will be moved from a geographical locus to a class basis. Demagoguery will rise as the left seeks to divert inquiry away from other causes of job dislocation such as burdensome and ubiquitous government regulations, a suffocating tax structure, unwise trade deals promoting job exfiltration from America, unnecessary and misdirected environmental restrictions, open border infiltration of job seekers, an ever expanding and deadening public as well as private debt, a political system waxing increasingly corrupt as it increasingly engages in market distorting crony capitalism, a pathetically incompetent educational system, and, ultimately worse of all, a debilitating victim and dependency culture.
Here we see ingredients for a toxic cocktail of dislocation and systemic breakdown which could become a perfect storm if the timing is right. This list does not even contemplate several foreseeable crises such as the entitlement funding balloon bursting in a few years nor does it contemplate the unforeseeable black swan events which the gods whimsically introduce into human affairs to confound all wise men. In the storm, should it come, the left will not let a good crisis go to waste. History suggests the right will simply muddle. All of the leftist inspired, government imposed causes of job dislocation catalogued above will only be made the more acute by automation and the dislocation caused by robots. If Chinese factories are automating and eliminating 90% of their workers, the impact on American employment statistics will be devastating. In a perfect storm, or in a gradually gathering storm, the remedy offered by the left for failed socialism, that is for government policies which have brought us to this place will be more, not less, socialism. That is the whole idea of not letting a crisis go to waste.
Conservatives, however, do have the answers and have had the answers for years: abandon the nonsense that diversity is strength, stop immigration, preserve the tremendous benefits to our economy of international trade but render trade fair as well as free, end crony capitalism, get the federal government out of education, cut taxes, cut regulation, cut spending.
Finally, if conservatives do not left will certainly deal with the employment and social dislocations inevitably to be caused by technology which for short we might call "robotisastion" which has been somewhat obscured by the wave of immigration but which is inevitable and is well advanced in some industries. The problem for conservatives will be to maintain the social fabric and to maintain a hold on the political destiny of the country and still maintain a conservative, capitalist policy where wealth is created by machines that do not pay Social Security, do not pay income taxes, and do not pay for health insurance. Those who can assemble the capital to create these machines can be made immensely wealthy and there is no present provision (or conservative ideology) either for providing for the workers the machines displace or for distributing not just goods and services made by these machines but that wealth created by the machines. We have a social system based on wages which provides taxation and the insurance and the mortgage money that makes our society work. What happens when the wage system is replaced by machines?
Yes, of course we have the historic examples of the Industrial Revolution which generated dislocations as an agrarian society was replaced with a modern industrial society that ultimately provided more jobs than it displaced. Ultimately, robotisastion will no doubt have the same effect but the pace of the dislocations will be far more rapid than that which occurred during the centuries since the industrial revolution began around 1800. The reaction of the Luddites, the squalor of London, the real suffering of people in those days occurred even though the transition took more than a century but the digital revolution has not just miniaturized technology, it has shrunk time. We must expect an acceleration, an extension, an intensification of the dislocations normally attendant on the introduction of revolutionary technology.
Perfect storm or gathering storm, conservatism must know what it believes in order to know what to do. If we do not provide conservative solutions we will find the voters accepting statist solutions which inevitably trade our liberty for leftist demagoguery.
Postscript: all of this is now coming to a head in the person of President-elect Trump. The point of this long reply in retrospect is to point out his responsibility not just to a few manufacturing jobs in the American Rust Belt but to the whole society, that is, he must understand that to save one portion of society from the rigors of outsourcing, immigration, automation, the digital revolution, or predatory trade wars, is inevitably to disfavor other sections of the economy. "Other sections of the economy" is a euphemism for the lives of real people.
