Are machines taking over our work?

This may sound like the question a Luddite would ask. But several articles recently have addressed the fact that machines are doing more and more work that humans have done, and these articles ask, Is this good or bad—or a mixture?

I read a novel not long ago (Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles) that mentioned “the Singularity,” the moment when a computer “wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness.” This is also the premise behind the Terminator movies. But I’m not addressing that—not yet.

In a Jan. 24 Associated Press story, “Imagining a Future When Machines Have All the Jobs,” Paul Wiseman refers to the book The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford. Ford describes a nightmare scenario, Wiseman writes: “Machines leave 75 percent of American workers unemployed by 2089. Consumer spending collapses. Even those who are still working slash spending and save everything they can; they fear their jobs are doomed, too. As people lose work, they stop contributing to Social Security, potentially bankrupting the retirement system.”

“Smarter machines will make life better and increase wealth in the economy,” Ford says. The challenge, however, “is to make sure the benefits are shared when most workers have been supplanted by machines.” He recommends “imposing massive taxes on companies, which would be paying far less in wages thanks to automation, and distributing the proceeds to those left unemployed by technology.”

In a Feb. 2 New York Times article, “Raging (Again) Against the Robots,” Catherine Rampell cautions against alarmist views of new technology. She recounts some of the dire warnings over the centuries against automation that takes over human labor and notes how laborers welfare has improved in the past 200 years, due largely to new technology, something Ford does not deny.

She goes on to quote economists who range from an optimistic Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, to a more pessimistic Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at M.I.T. and co-author of the book Race Against the Machine.

Mokyr says: “Every invention ever made caused some people to lose jobs. … In a good society, when this happens, they put you out to pasture and give you a golf club and a condo in Florida. In a bad society, they put you on the dole, so you have just enough not to starve, but that’s about it.”

Brynjolfsson argues that we have reached a sort of inflection point in productivity growth and that “any job that can be reduced to an algorithm will [lead] to the displacement of workers in industries as diverse as retail and radiology.”

In the March issue of The Atlantic, Jonathan Cohn’s article “The Robot Will See You Now” shows how machines are replacing human workers in health care.

Cohn writes: “IBM’s Watson—the same machine that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy—is now churning through case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, learning to make diagnoses and treatment recommendations.”

This practice is becoming widespread. Cohn notes that “in Brazil and India, machines are already starting to do primary care, because there’s no labor to do it. They may be better than doctors. Mathematically, they will follow evidence—and they’re much more likely to be right.”

And one doctor says he doesn’t think physicians “will be seeing patients as much in the future.” They’ll become “super-quality-control officers.”

These changes will likely be good for some and bad for others. Rampell writes: “Historically, the children of displaced workers have benefited from mechanization, but the displaced workers themselves have often been permanently passé.”

This all makes me think of a line from a Bruce Springsteen song, how we all need "just a little of that human touch." And robots, like too much of our society, lacks a heart.