The Inevitable Read online

  When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a-kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles—but, of course, over time the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that.

  This postindustrial economy will keep expanding because each person’s task (in part) will be to invent new things to do that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots. In the coming years robot-driven cars and trucks will become ubiquitous; this automation will spawn the new human occupation for former truck drivers of trip optimizer, a person who tweaks the traffic algorithms for optimal energy and time usage. Routine robosurgery will necessitate the new medical skills of keeping complex machines sterile. When automatic self-tracking of all your activities becomes the normal thing to do, a new breed of professional analysts will arise to help you make sense of the data. And of course we will need a whole army of robot nannies, dedicated to keeping your personal robots up and running. Each of these new vocations will in turn be taken over by automation later.

  The real revolution erupts when everyone has personal workbots, the descendants of Baxter, at their beck and call. Imagine you are one of the 0.1 percent of people who still farm. You run a small organic farm with direct sales to your customers. You still have a job as a farmer, but robots do most of the actual farmwork. Your fleets of worker bots do all the outside work under the hot sun—weeding, pest control, and harvesting of produce—as directed by a very smart mesh of probes in the soil. Your new job as farmer is overseeing the farming system. One day your task might be to research which variety of heirloom tomato to plant; the next day to find out what your customers crave; the following day might be the time to update the information on your custom labels. The bots perform everything else that can be measured.

  Right now it seems unthinkable: We can’t imagine a bot that can assemble a stack of ingredients into a gift or manufacture spare parts for our lawn mower or fabricate materials for our new kitchen. We can’t imagine our nephews and nieces running a dozen workbots in their garage, churning out inverters for their friend’s electric vehicle startup. We can’t imagine our children becoming appliance designers, making custom batches of liquid nitrogen dessert machines to sell to the millionaires in China. But that’s what personal robot automation will enable.

  Everyone will have access to a personal robot, but simply owning one will not guarantee success. Rather, success will go to those who best optimize the process of working with bots and machines. Geographical clusters of production will matter, not for any differential in labor costs but because of the differential in human expertise. It’s human-robot symbiosis. Our human assignment will be to keep making jobs for robots—and that is a task that will never be finished. So we will always have at least that one “job.”

  * * *

  • • •

  In the coming years, our relationships with robots will become ever more complex. But already a recurring pattern is emerging. No matter what your current job or your salary, you will progress through a predictable cycle of denial again and again. Here are the Seven Stages of Robot Replacement:

  1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.

  2. [Later.]

  OK, it can do a lot of those tasks, but it can’t do everything I do.

  3. [Later.]

  OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.

  4. [Later.]

  OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.

  5. [Later.]

  OK, OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.

  6. [Later.]

  Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more interesting and pays more!

  7. [Later.]

  I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now.

  [Repeat.]

  This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that resembles drudgery will be handed over to robots by the accountants.

  We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.

  It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.

  3

  FLOWING

  The internet is the world’s largest copy machine. At its most fundamental level this machine copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. Some bits of data may be copied dozens of times in an ordinary day as they cycle through memory, cache, server, routers, and back. Tech companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. If something can be copied—a song, a movie, a book—and it touches the internet, it will be copied.

  The digital economy runs on this river of freely flowing copies. In fact, our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a superconductor, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. This is what it means when something goes viral. The copies are recopied, and those duplications ripple outward launching new copies, in an endless contagious wave. Once a copy has touched the internet, it never leaves.

  This superdistribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins the major sectors of a 21st-century economy. Copy-prone products, such as software, music, movies, and games are among the most valuable exports of the U.S., and they issue from the industries where the U.S. has a globally competitive advantage. American wealth therefore sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

  We can’t stop massive indiscriminate copying. Not only would that sabotage the engine of wealth if we could, but it would halt the internet itself. Free-flowing copies are baked into the nature of this global communications system. The technology of the net needs to copy without constraint. The flow of copies is inevitable.

  Our civilization’s previous economy was built upon warehouses of fixed goods and factories stockpiled with solid cargo. These physical stocks are still necessary, but they are no longer sufficient for wealth and happiness. Our attention has moved away from stocks of solid goods to flows of intangibles, like copies. We value not only the atoms in a thing, but their immaterial arrangement and design and, even more, their ability to adapt and flow in response to our needs.

  Formerly solid produc
ts made of steel and leather are now sold as fluid services that keep updating. Your solid car parked in a driveway has been transformed into a personal on-demand transportation service supplied by Uber, Lyft, Zip, and Sidecar—which are improving faster than automobiles are. Grocery shopping is no longer a hit-or-miss affair; now a steady flow of household replenishables streams into our homes uninterrupted. You get a better telephone every few months because a flow of new operating systems install themselves on your smartphone, adding new features and new benefits that in the past would have required new hardware. Then, when you do get new hardware, the service maintains the familiar operating system you had, flowing your personalization onto the new device. This total sequence of perpetual upgrades is continuous. It’s a dream come true for our insatiable human appetite: rivers of uninterrupted betterment.

  At the heart of this new regime of constant flux is ever tinier specks of computation. We are currently entering the third phase of computing, the Flows.

  The initial age of computing borrowed from the industrial age. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files.” They were hierarchically ordered, like much of the industrial age that the computer was overthrowing.

  The second digital age overturned the office metaphor and brought us the organizing principle of the web. The basic unit was no longer files but “pages.” Pages were not organized into folders, but were arranged into a networked web. The web was a billion hyperlinked pages which contained everything, both stored information and active knowledge. The desktop interface was replaced by a “browser,” a uniform window that looked into any and all pages. This web of links was flat.

  Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams. We constantly monitor Twitter streams and the flows of posts on our Facebook wall. We stream photos, movies, and music. News banners stream across the bottom of TVs. We subscribe to YouTube streams, called channels. And RSS feeds from blogs. We are bathed in streams of notifications and updates. Our apps improve in a flow of upgrades. Tags have replaced links. We tag and “like” and “favorite” moments in the streams. Some streams, like Snapchat, Facebook Live, and Periscope, operate totally in the present, with no past or future. They just flow past. If you see something, fine. Then it is gone.

  Flowing time has shifted as well. In the first era, tasks were accomplished in batch mode. You got your bills every month. Taxes were all paid on the same day of the year. Telephone service came only in units of 30 days. Items piled up and were dealt with in batches. Then, in the second age, along came the web, and very quickly we expected everything the same day. If we withdrew money from our bank, we expected the deduction to show up in our account that same day, not at the end of the month. If we sent an email, we expected a reply later in the day, not two weeks later, like regular mail. Our cycle time jumped from batch mode to daily mode. This was a big deal. The expectation shifted so fast, many institutions were caught off guard. People ran out of patience waiting to be sent a form they needed to fill out; if they couldn’t fill it out that day, they moved on.

  Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time. If we message someone, we expect them to reply instantly. If we spend money, we expect the balance in our account to adjust in real time. Why should medical diagnostics take days to return results instead of immediately? If we take a quiz in class, why shouldn’t the score be instant? For news, we demand to know what is happening this very second, not an hour ago. Unless it occurs in real time, it does not exist. The corollary—and this is important—is that in order to operate in real time, everything has to flow.

  For instance, watching movies on demand means movies must flow. Like most families who subscribe to Netflix, our family became real-time snobs. Unless a movie was available on streaming, we ignored it. Netflix’s DVD catalog is about 10 times larger and higher quality than its streaming catalog, but we’d rather watch a lesser show in real time than wait two days for something better on a DVD. Simultaneity trumps quality.

  Real-time books, ditto. In predigital days I bought printed books long before I intended to read them. If I spied an enticing book in a bookstore, I bought it. At first, the internet deepened my hefty backlog because I encountered more and more recommendations online. When the Kindle came along, I switched to primarily purchasing only digital books, but I kept the old habit of purchasing ebooks whenever I encountered a great recommendation. It was so easy! Click, got it. Then I had an epiphany that I am sure others have had as well. If I purchase a book ahead of time, it just sits in the same place that a book I have not bought sits (in the cloud) but in the paid bucket instead of the unpaid bucket. Why not just leave it in the unpaid bucket? So now I don’t purchase a book until I am ready to read it in the next 30 seconds. This sort of just-in-time purchasing is the natural consequence of real-time streaming.

  In the industrial age, companies did their utmost to save themselves time by increasing their efficiency and productivity. That is not enough today. Now organizations need to save their customers and citizens time. They need to do their utmost to interact in real time. Real time is human time. An ATM gets you cash much faster than waiting for a bank teller—and more efficiently too—but what we really want is instant cash at our fingertips, something like the real-time money offered by the streaming companies of Square, PayPal, Alipay, or Apple Pay. So in order to run in real time, our technological infrastructure needed to liquefy. Nouns needed to be verbs. Fixed solid things became services. Data couldn’t remain still. Everything had to flow into the stream of now.

  The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud. Software flows from the cloud to you as a stream of upgrades. The cloud is where your stream of texts go before they arrive on your friend’s screen. The cloud is where the parade of movies under your account rests until you call for them. The cloud is the reservoir that songs escape from. The cloud is the seat where the intelligence of Siri sits, even as she speaks to you. The cloud is the new organizing metaphor for computers. The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds.

  * * *

  • • •

  The first industry to be steamrolled by the switch to real time and the cloud of copies was music. Perhaps because music itself is so flowing—a stream of notes whose beauty lasts only as long as the stream continues—it was the first to undergo liquidity. As the music industry reluctantly transformed, it revealed a pattern of change that would repeat itself again and again in other media, of books, movies, games, news. Later, the same transformation from fixities to flows began to overturn shopping, transportation, and education. This inevitable shift toward fluidity is now transforming almost every other aspect of society. The saga of music’s upgrade to the realm of fluidity will reveal where we are headed.

  Music has been altered by technology for more than a century. Early gramophone equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians abbreviated meandering works to fit to the phonograph, and today the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes. Cheap industrial reproduction of gramophone recordings 100 years ago unleashed mind-boggling quantities of inexpensive exact copies—and a sense that music was something one consumed.

  The grand upset that music is now experiencing—the transformation that pioneers such as Napster and BitTorrent signaled a decade ago—is the shift from analog copies to digital copies. The industrial age was driven by analog copies—exact and cheap. The information age is driven by digital copies—exact and free.

  Free is hard to ignore. It propels duplication at a scale that would previously have been unbelievable. The top ten music videos have bee
n watched (for free) over 10 billion times. Of course, it’s not just music that is being copied freely. It is text, pictures, video, games, entire websites, enterprise software, 3-D printer files. In this new online world, anything that can be copied will be copied for free.

  A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury. In the industrial age, exact copies became more valuable than a handmade original. No one wants the inventor’s clunky “original” prototype refrigerator. Most people want a perfect working clone. The more common the clone, the more desirable it is, since it comes with a network of service and repair outlets.

  Now the axis of value has flipped again. Rivers of free copies have undermined the established order. In this new supersaturated digital universe of infinite free digital duplication, copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap—free, in fact—that the only things truly valuable are those that cannot be copied. The technology is telling us that copies don’t count anymore. To put it simply: When copies are superabundant, they become worthless. Instead, stuff that can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

  When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?

  Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database or warehouse it. You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). Since we prefer to deal with someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege. We call that branding. Brand companies can command higher prices for similar products and services from companies without brands because they are trusted for what they promise. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.