Here’s a sign of the times, and the shape of things to come. I needed a couple items for a dinner menu and ran into the vast food emporium near home. The few checkout lines that were manned had long queues. So, I pivoted toward the scan-it-yourself line and waved my purchases at the all-seeing eye.
All went well until I got to a head of Bibb lettuce in a plastic clamshell. The reader read the code and even recorded the price but refused to let me continue. A human’s attention was required. None were anywhere in sight. After a long wait, I finally caught the eye of a passing employee.
“What gives?” I asked a haughty young man decades my junior. He gazed at me with contempt and told me to enter the quantity. I pointed out that the head of lettuce was individually packaged, priced and bar coded. “You have to add the quantity,” he said, and punched in the number “one.”
He clearly felt the technology was only as smart as the customers, and that when the last old fool died he and his robot overlords would find life much easier. I felt the technology was only as smart as the programmers, and that the one responsible for this one had merely annoyed me, but that the odds were not insignificant of the next glitch, bug, coder’s typo or oversight, hack, or enemy assault killing me.
Already GPS devices have routed inattentive or overly trusting drivers into lakes or other dangerous situations. One self-driving car has already killed a pedestrian and another failed to identify a barrier ahead and when it got close accelerated rather than braking. This managed to total the car as thoroughly as a joyriding teen or DUI recidivist.
Despite innumerable examples of cyber devices making life more trouble rather than less (quit spying on me, Alexa!), the spread of their hegemony seems inevitable. Why? In the words of Cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies — Money, Money, Money, Money.
Scanning a lousy head of lettuce may have raised my blood pressure and made me less likely to think well of my grocery, but having a few dim-witted scanners installed is a lot cheaper than paying people to serve your customers. Remember, I was scanning in the first place because the lines were long because there were so few remaining flesh and blood employees. This is the house that silicon built.
When I was a kid, I visited a daily paper where dozens of skilled workers were sitting at clattering linotype machines setting the next day’s edition in hot type. By the time I was writing for a paper, fifteen or twenty years later, the linotypes and their compositors were gone, and phototypesetting was the rule, allowing pages to be assembly by cutting and pasting pictures of print, not actual type
A few years later, digital technology put the compositor’s job on a desktop, and moved much of it to the news department where writers and editors had to worry about layout because whole layers of unionized tradesmen had been eliminated.
It goes without saying that the savings realized in this transition did not go into the pay packets of the survivors but into those of the owners and shareholders. The victory was short-lived since free, if often unreliable, news on the internet and alternative destinations for advertising dollars destroyed the daily newspaper. One where I used to work was certainly valued in the hundreds of millions, then. What was left of it sold recently for $34 million.
Perhaps the world-altering creative destruction we are witnessing daily will create a better world. But for whom? And who will decide if whether it’s better or not? Probably not the customers or even the employees. The owners and investors perhaps, or the financial engineers, or maybe only the algorithms themselves.
The logic of the cyberverse has shown itself to be impervious to cries of compliant, disappointment, sorrow at what is being lost, suspicion of what is being gained, or even ballads that keen we have paved paradise and put up a server farm. They do not compute. And, perhaps neither do we. How long until the machines decide we are as obsolete as hot type. We’ve grown accustomed to pulling the plug on yesterday’s tech. Will tomorrow’s tech pull the plug on us?