Productivity increases are good, right? Seems like it. And anyway, what choice do we have? We’re all like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland. If we don’t keep running, we’ll go backward.

Still, while fighting with the automated checkout station at the grocery story this morning it hit me that this job used to be done by a person who got paid, paid taxes, bought things from the grocery store and drugstore across the street, and kept the whole system running.

It’s getting on to 50 years or so since Walter Reuther asked an auto executive who was going on about the wonders of robotic assembly lines of the future whether the robot would also buy the cars. Seems to me that he was on to something

I’ve been told that I just don’t get it and I freely admit that maybe I don’t.

It just seems to me that the offices that don’t need secretaries because of word processors, and the grocery stores and hardware stores that don’t need checkers because of automated checkout, and the fast food places that don’t need people to make lattes because there are machines that do it, are all putting potential customers out of work little by little.

Eventually, who is going to have the money to buy the stuff? The five people left who program the robots simply don’t need that many bags of groceries.

I am just wondering -

• Do the people freed up from doing these tasks really move to better jobs?
• Do the machines really save money after the costs of acquisition and maintenance?
• Are we really “running fast enough” on the innovation, job-creation end of things for it to balance out?

• Does it matter if we do or not?

There have been scholarly books written on the topic, but how many of us have time to read them, given that we are all racing to keep up the the productivity treadmill?

Tags: automation, productivity, robots, taxes