This is the second in a series of short essays designed to foment policy discussions in order to craft a unified message for the Democratic Party. There was a fair amount of negative reaction to my first essay from those who believe that now is not the time for these discussions—that our focus should be squarely on removing the current President from office. I certainly understand that sentiment, but I genuinely believe that we can put ourselves in a better position to win future elections by looking inward to determine who we are and what we stand for, rather than defining ourselves by the things that we hate.
Since at least the 1930s, the Democratic Party has characterized itself as the party of labor. In spite of all of the bemoaning about the loss of the “white working class” in the 2016 election, this is still the case. Since at least the 1970s, the Democratic Party has characterized itself as the party of environmentalists. With increased attention being paid to climate science and retrograde views on evolutionary biology and scientific research being espoused by the opposing party, the Democratic Party has evolved into the pro-science, pro-technology party. Unfortunately, there is an increasing amount of friction between labor and technology. How do we resolve these conflicts? Does our longstanding support for labor trump our relatively recent support for science and technology? Or do we need to evaluate each conflict on a case-by-case basis? Or is it possible that these conflicts aren’t even real conflicts—that they are the horns of a false dilemma?
As a possible example of the latter, I’d like to open the discussion with the coal miners and the EPA. At first glance, this appears to be an issue on which progressives and Democrats have abandoned a long-time constituency in favor of environmentalism and climate science. However, I genuinely believe that there is no real conflict here. There are a lot of reasons why coal mining is never going to be a significant industry again, and not all of them are environmental reasons. I think it’s very possible that we could enhance our green energy message by including coal miners and coal mining families in our revitalization plans. Rather than talking about shutting down coal mines and killing the industry, we could talk about bringing green jobs to an area that has been devastated by an evolving economy.
But not every labor/technology conflict has such an easy compromise. What do we do about protecting jobs that are being replaced by computers and robots? Do we fight back against the advancement of technology? Do we pass laws prohibiting consumers from pumping their own gas? Do we pass laws banning grocery store do-it-yourself scanners? What about the Amazon Go supermarket with no employees at all? While the economic anxiety of being replaced by a machine has existed since the Victorian Era (see, e.g. John Henry), it certainly seems like those fears are finally coming to fruition—at least for a large swath of traditionally middle-class jobs. While those in the professional industries have largely protected themselves with complicated licensing regimes, many whose jobs involve research, customer service, and even writing and reporting are staring into a future where they can’t compete with artificial intelligence.
About a decade ago, I read a book called Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by an Austrian-born author named Hans Peter Moravec. The first three-quarters of the book deal with present-day (published in 1998) experiments with robotic technology, but the last quarter reads almost like science fiction. Moravec envisions a future in which robots have replaced humans in almost every field. Corporations, driven by the insatiable desire to create more and more profit, will cut humans out of the picture wherever it makes economic sense to do so. Soon, even the new robots will be designed and built by other robots. The robot companies will be making billions, but what will the rest of us do? Well, it turns out that it is cheaper to pay a human minimum wage than it is to design and build a robot to sweep and mop the floor, so we’d all better put away our computers and calculators and get out our brooms and mops. As middle class jobs decrease, minimum wage jobs will increase. The middle class will be effectively hollowed out.
So what do we do? Where do we stand? Do we become Luddites? Or do we invest heavily in technology and push ourselves toward the singularity? Or is there a middle path? Moravec suggests heavy corporate taxes and some sort of universal basic income. And there’s another issue that we should discuss: universal basic income. I have the impression that it’s ideologically attractive, but politically dead-on-arrival. What do you think?