I am grieved to discover only now that there is a robot film festival held annually in New York. The second iteration of the annual fest was held this past weekend. Google was on hand with a short film of a legally blind driver taking an unmanned car for a spin. Hollywood took the opportunity to promo a robot companion heist film coming out later this summer. And awards were given out to a few of the filmmakers, including those behind Invisible Robota. It captures the presence of the unseen robots we interact with every day, and took home the award for most uncanny:
Why uncanny? Perhaps because of the ghosts of jobs past that the filmmakers animate here and the country's alarmingly high unemployment rate. They're eating all of our jobs! Or at least that's what MIT business school researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have suggested.
Robots doing more work for us should be a good thing. Less drudgery for us. More time to have fun! McAfee lays that perspective out here in the MIT Technology Review:
Erik Brynjolfsson came up with a great phrase: "digital Athens." The Athenian citizens had lives of leisure; they got to participate in democracy and create art. That was largely because they had slaves to do the work. Okay, I don't want human slaves, but in a very, very automated and digitally productive economy you don't need to work as much, as hard, with as many people, to get the fruits of the economy. So the optimistic version is that we finally have more hours in our week freed up from toil and drudgery.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what we're getting yet:
What we are seeing—and this was pretty much unanticipated—is that the people at the top of the skill, wage, and income distribution are working more hours. We have this preference for doing more work. The people who have a lot of leisure—I think in too many cases it's involuntary. It's unemployment or underemployment. That is not my version of digital Athens.
Perhaps we need baby steps to bring Digital Athens into being.
Step one: Bring the toga back into fashion.
Step two: Start calling the mall "the agora."
Step three: Call it the "leisure rate" instead of the "unemployment rate."
Step four: Make the robots do all the work.
Step five: Completely rethink our economy.
