Dumb Science Fiction Part 3: Workers of the Future, Unite! (Wait, where is everybody?)

 In my last two posts, I wrote about some of the dumb motives science fiction writers give to aliens (they've come for our water!), and about some of the stupid clichés that persist around robots, who we keep trying to imagine as looking and acting just like us. 

Today's post again tackles motives and robots, but this time I'll be going the opposite way and arguing that science fiction is strangely devoid of robots stepping into human jobs fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years from now. 

It's a fairly common trope to show poor human laborers working in drudgery in some futuristic setting while a few spoiled elites cruelly rule over all. We live in a world where we see this happening all around us. Jeff Bezos gets richer than God, while his warehouse workers work for subpar wages and have to pee in bottles since they are denied bathroom breaks. The family that owns Walmart controls more wealth than the GDP of entire countries, and pay their employees so poorly they still qualify for food assistance. And the American workers are lucky! A non-trivial percentage of the stuff sold by Amazon and Walmart is assembled using actual slave labor in places like China. The rich owe their wealth to the exploitation of the poor, this is how the world has always worked, and imagining nothing will change a thousand years from now seems like a fairly safe bet. 

However, there's a counter current to all this. When mankind first started farming, building cities, or fighting wars, the key to power was manpower. If you wanted to build a stone fortress, you needed a lot of men to do the labor. But around 1750, the dawn of the industrial age, some wise people came to the realization that people suck as workers. They goof off if you cut them any slack, run away if you whip them too hard, and complain endlessly. They get sick, get drunk, and die pretty young. And they eat up a lot of profit. Literally. Their fuel system is hideously inefficient. You want to feed them only enough calories to carry a sword or plow a field, and they keep using those calories to make body heat, heal their wounds, and make babies. These meatbags are the biggest obstacle to real wealth! I mean, people probably knew this before 1750, but there really hadn't been any alternatives. Then, boom, machines. One guy driving a tractor can now sow and harvest a field that used to require a dozen workers. A single mechanical loom turns out more cloth in a day than a whole warehouse full of weavers used to produce in a week. Carting a thousand tons of coal any significant distance used to require hundreds of men, oxen, and wagons,  and now a crew of maybe a dozen men can move it a hundred miles or more via locomotive. Of course, you need human laborers to lay the ties and tracks... until more and more of that process gets taken over by machines. Ah, but you need humans to build the machines! Except, really, in a matter of decades, most machines are being built by other machines. 

The real history of civilization over the last two-hundred years hasn't fundamentally been about the wealthy finding new ways to exploit human labor. The bigger trend has been that the wealthy have been most passionately exploiting every opportunity to reduce and eliminate human labor. If your job requires muscles to perform some task, say, pulling inventory off shelves in a warehouse, don't count on that job to be around fifty years from now. They didn't really need your muscles to pick up that box. We've known that machine power beats muscle power for centuries. What we really needed from a warehouse worker was his eyes and his brain. If you send someone into the warehouse to pick up a pallet of toilet paper, we needed a machine that knew what a pallet of toilet paper looked like. Fifty years ago, the only machine capable of that recognition was a biological one, human eyes connected to a human brain. But now, machines have better eyes, and they are quickly developing better brains. I'm not talking about a robot brain that superior because it can do all the things a human mind can do, but one that's superior at a task because of all the things it can't do. When the robot forklift goes into the warehouse to find the toilet paper, it's not going to stop to chat with coworkers. It's not going to be daydreaming about dinner and forget what it came back to find. It's not going to sneak out the back door for a smoke break. It's going to do the one thing I knows how to do, execute a command. 

Maybe you're reading this and thinking, man, it sucks to be a warehouse worker in this day and age, being made obsolete by technology. Good thing I'm a brain surgeon! Yeah, good luck with that. I'd argue that you're maybe two decades away from being replaced by machines entirely. Machines already have superior sensory capacity, agility, precision, and endurance. Highly trained humans used to be needed analyze an x-ray or interpret lab results. Now, artificial intelligence is starting to be used to assist in these functions. The work of hundreds of trained technicians measuring little dark splotches and writing up reports on whether or not they've found tumors is giving way to two or three techs who check behind the computer that has already highlighted all the tumors it found. Today, it's maybe two or three techs per hospital. In a few years, it will be two or three techs serving a dozen hospitals.

In fact, as I'm typing out what's going to happen in the future in medicine, I realize there's a real possibility I'm already a decade behind the times. This week, I went to the hospital and when I checked in I noticed they had a weird mounted camera I'd never seen before on my side of the check-in glass. They asked for my permission to scan my retinas! So now, in this hospital system, the day is coming when I'll check in just by letting a machine scan my eye, look up in the database my reason for being there, and I'll probably get a text telling me what room I need to go to. The row of people sitting at desks to check people in won't be there a decade from now. 

We're in a moment when technology makes human mental and physical labor obsolete at accelerating speeds. Yet, obviously, people still have jobs! A ton of them require manual labor! There are more people working than ever before in human history! 

Which is true. As machines free humans from repetitive drudgework, we've so far proven quite adaptable at inventing new work to do. The result has been a stunning advancement in the quality of human life. I know that in inequality of wealth makes the relative poverty of some people stand out, but by any objective historical standards we do a stunning job of getting food into people's bellies. Around the world, more and more people drink clean water than ever before, and they live under roofs they aren't sharing with chickens and goats. Democracy also has worked out stunningly well, allowing the crafting of laws that protect citizens from automobiles that push their steering columns though people's chests in collisions, or from snail oil tonics made of actual snake and petroleum. 99.9 percent of the food you purchase in grocery store won't be teaming with parasites and vermin droppings! And, if you find some that is, no problem, assuming you cook it in your stove that works simply because you turn a knob, not because you spent all morning splitting firewood or gathering dried cow patties. For anyone complaining that 2020 was the worst year in human history to be alive, honestly, I don't understand how anything but a willful and carefully cultivated ignorance of any history predating your own birth can explain your point of view. 

At this point, it might seem like I've forgotten the actual topic of my post, which is bad science fiction. My rant so far has been building to this: a lot of far future still shows people doing jobs that almost certainly won't exist in the time period portrayed. I can't tell you the number of science fiction films I see where someone is working as a miner, a soldier, a doctor, or even the pilot of a spaceship. I promise you that when we do have interstellar spacecraft, they will not have steering wheels or joysticks. Humans might still be allowed to pick destinations, but all the actual piloting would be done via computer. The idea that a pathogen spewing, microorganism breeding factory like a human doctor would be allowed to be in the same room with a patient is absurd. Human soldiers are already starting to play the role of bait that draws enemy fire so that drones can come in and do the actual enemy killing. As for mining, arranging for the food, water, and air that would allow humans with jackhammers to mine an asteroid is much more complex task than just designing the right machine for the job. Only, it won't be us designing the machines, we'll just feed some specifications into an engineering AI and it will spit out a few designs. Some committee of humans might still have the glorious job of picking out one of these options. Then the designs will be transmitted to a factory where robots will produce the machines without human intervention. 

Labor as we know it today will only exist as a luxury good. Some humans will be cooking, cleaning, and sewing suits for much wealthier people, even though machines could achieve the same or better output. There's just a subclass of humanity that will always enjoy flaunting their prestige by casually mentioning that they have maids and nannies and personal chefs. I also think we'll still pay people to be entertainers. There will probably be good income to be made from politics. Some of these politics will involve carving out special protections for human workers against all reason. There are still states in the US where the law requires that gas station attendants pump gas instead of allowing people to do it themselves. We'll likely have human postal workers into the 22nd century even though every single step of the mail delivery process could be either automated or eliminated altogether. 

I don't completely lose my ability to enjoy a science fiction story if it's set on Mars five hundred years in the future and one of the characters has a job as a police officer. But if you really want to delight me as a consumer of science fiction, show me that you've really thought about the work your character does. Show me you don't just know your character's motive for being a xeno-surgeon, but  have given real thought to why the job would exist in the first place and why a human is a better choice for the job than a robot.