By Gerry Harant
Twenty years ago, when I was part of a team working on a major project with the Wool and Textile Division of CSIRO in Geelong, I first heard of the idea of robotic sheep shearing. Having watched shearers at work, I understood a little of the superb coordination of hand, eye and nearly every muscle in the body needed for this job.
My colleagues and I, who specialised in designing automatic machinery, found the robot proposition preposterous and competed in suggesting bizarre ways of doing it. The "solution" which got the unofficial prize was based on the fact that a sheep is born with at least one hole at each end which would allow us to machine the creature between centres on a lathe. The runner-up suggested growing the poor beast in a flat-sided frame so that it presented, when it came to be shorn, a box-like shape with flat surfaces which a machine could handle. I said that if the project went ahead, I would believe its success when the designer allowed the machine to trim his pubic hair.
Despite our well-founded misgivings, the project went on. Five years' work and a couple of millions of dollars, they said, would produce a working machine. Off and on, we have had this project attempted, perhaps three or four times; if you go to the Sydney Powerhouse Museum, you will see it treated seriously there in one of the exhibits.
The non-problem of robotic sheep shearing looms large in the minds of technological soothsayers. One of these is Jeremy Rifkin (The end of work, reviewed in GLW August 21), who says it will take only another five years and, from memory, $10 million to produce a working prototype.
Rifkin's other examples are of similar phoney quality. From these he predicts, yet again, the disappearance of work. I say yet again, because this claim has emerged with truly monotonous regularity over the last quarter of a century.
Innovation and labour
As an engineer very interested in the history of technology, I find, as do others, that development of technology has, if anything, slowed down over this period compared to previous ones. The really important, and often most destructive, innovations this century have been in the area of chemistry and chemical engineering (such as gave rise to literally thousands of new drugs, agricultural fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and hormonal products), metallurgical and chemical materials science (cutting tools, plastics, ceramics), low-tech items like bulldozers and chainsaws which are being used to transform the planet into a wasteland and, more recently, industrial instrumentation and communications (although the automatic telephone dates back to 1910).
These technological innovations have indeed transformed not only life in industrial countries but the planet itself. In the process, many of the 19th century trades have disappeared, others have been generated; jobs have been lost and others created. This picture has defined the industrial revolution. In some manufactured products which have been with us since the 1750s, labour content has decreased by a factor of hundreds: think of an 18th century watchmaker filing each tooth in a gear by hand, for instance.
Somehow, this total picture is not what the prophets of worklessness have in mind; they are fixated on one device, the digital computer, and its minor offspring, the industrial robot.
In the old story, a sorcerer's apprentice turns a broomstick into a robot carrying water upstairs to fill his master's bath. Robot-besotted writers see the elimination of work in just that light — building a mechanism which directly replaces the human labourer. This image persists even though people have known for millennia that the simple answer to the problem of filling baths is a piped water supply, not a bucket-carrying robot.
Obsession with robots is why the picture most frequently used as the prime example of a modern automatic factory process is that of a cumbersome robotic arm spot-welding car bodies. Never mind that programmed automatic machinery goes back to the beginning of the last century, when the Jacquard loom was used to weave complex lace patterns. Never mind that in the production of car parts, fully automatic production has been the rule ever since Henry Ford. As far as the technological prophets are concerned, before the robot there were only the hammer and chisel.
What really turns on these would-be gurus is the sorcerer's apprentice notion of constructing a mechanism in which, by a monstrous flight of wishful thinking, they perceive some human characteristics, to perform (as in the example of the shearer) precisely the same task previously performed by the human worker. This is not how technology works; almost invariably, mass production, automatic or manual, requires a redesign of the process of production, and frequently a modification of the product.
Notions of control mechanisms which replace workers have been responsible for a decline in mechanical engineering in the last quarter-century. These days, when conservation of materials and energy should be heading the engineering agenda, techniques such as cold-forming of metals can generate huge savings. They coincidentally also save far more labour than the current approach of automating existing processes; in most cases, this would have been done decades ago if it were possible. However, much production engineering nowadays is not about lowering costs or maximising return on investment, but about reducing labour content in manufacture at any price.
This is strange; cost of the labour content in most manufactured items is 5-10% of production cost. Hence saving 10% of labour (a massive task in a complex product) could save only around 1% of costs. On the other hand, cutting out all rejects in a product where materials account for 60% of costs and 5% goes in scrap due to poor process control, would result in a savings equivalent to the total of shop-floor labour costs as well as yielding an additional 5% productivity. Instead of following this thought, most "industrial engineering" concentrates, in effect, on producing scrap more quickly.
Enter the computers
Many of the current predictions of worklessness hinge on the idea that computers will shortly "make everything". Computers are control mechanisms; on their own, they produce nothing. A computer can control a machine, but without a machine to control, or peripherals like a printer or terminal, it is a mere brain, and an intellectually challenged brain at that.
Computers are great at allowing access to lots of data — they have revolutionised library systems — and fantastic at drawing pretty pictures where each tiny point needs a lot of calculations, such as in graphs or engineering drafting or animation. In management, the overload of computer data has led to managers looking at terminals instead of at industrial reality. In manufacture, computers are one extension of industrial electronics, widespread use of which goes back to the '30s. There has been no "computer revolution".
As an example, my colleague and I are currently reworking an automatic balancing machine which I had a major part in designing in 1972. The original had some 60 printed circuit cards which had to be designed and built individually. Now we can do the same job with three bought-in items, one of which is an industrial personal computer.
The reworked machine is neither faster nor more accurate than the 1972 version. Most of its 20,000 lines of computer code go into creating pretty coloured pictures on the screen. The only major new features are an automated set-up procedure, made necessary by the now prevailing short production runs, and data preservation, on disk within the computer, for each work-piece processed. In 1972 that would have needed an extra unit called a "data-logger", but it could have been done.
The real changes
True, if you go into any industrial work situation today, you are likely to find electronic additions to production machinery, mainly for measurement and set-up. In the automotive metal industry, you may see many computer-controlled "machining centres". These, however, don't replace manual operations. They often replace faster single-purpose automatic machines which were made obsolete by the current fetish for ever new models and more and more makes of cars, which is made possible by this versatile machinery.
Because these machines often take many minutes to complete their cycle, consisting of many operations on a single work-piece, they are either grouped in "cells" with a single operator loading and unloading them, or a "pick-and-place" robot is programmed to do the loading if the parts can be presented so that a robot can pick them up.
Lay people, when going through such a factory, might easily gain the impression that before this set-up was installed all these operations had to be performed manually, which is nonsense. In the "old days" of mass production of components, a special purpose machine applying many tools simultaneously would have done the job faster but would have cost far more to build and couldn't have done any other job. Nowadays it is the programmable machine which is mass produced. In fact, the labour component in this sort of "high tech" plant is much the same as it always was — some 5-10% of production cost.
Which, then, are all these jobs which are supposed to have disappeared ? Look around: in most established areas of human endeavour, perversely, the old methods based on human skills largely persist. Houses are still built by carpenters, bricklayers, tilers, plumbers, electricians and concreters. Buses, trucks, trains, trams, ships and even planes need skilled drivers and pilots. The sweated women in backyards sewing garments use precisely the same machines as their grandmothers when they were similarly exploited during the last depression. Printing presses still look and work like printing presses, looms still need weavers, boots are, except for the soles, still made by the methods and machines used towards the end of last century. Shearers still shear sheep.
Why then, given the consistent failure of the pundits' predictions, are they still at it? And why do academics, who would normally be expected to produce statistics to show jobs which have actually gone to computers, mindlessly repeat these assumptions and cite phoney examples which don't stand up to a minute's scrutiny?
For a start, both popular and academic writers have had a bit of a shock in recent years. For the first time, their domains have been invaded by machinery such as word processors, faxes and other gadgets which they often have difficulty in operating and which function in ways mysterious to them, gadgets which have short-circuited some of the laborious processes they were previously involved in. It is easy for them to jump to the conclusion that work as they have known it is coming to an end.
This feeling has, unfortunately, been a common experience for other workers since the start of the industrial revolution; the difference is that these newly threatened victims of technology extrapolate their predicament to insist that work as they have never known it is also disappearing.
Also, let's face it, work is disappearing. It isn't going to robots or computers. It is going to other countries where production methods are similar to ours. And cheap labour is only one of many reasons why our livelihoods are being exported. Indeed, given that shop-floor labour costs in manufacture make up only 5-10% of total cost, the preoccupation with this component and desperate attempts to eliminate it is hard to understand on rational grounds.
But then, rationality doesn't enter into it. Somehow, in a strange parody of Marx's labour theory of value, "efficiency" is seen as value of throughput per working hour rather than as return on investment.
The ideological driving force behind the wishful thinking which wants to see all workers eliminated is the instinctive fear and loathing which many employers display towards the skilled workers on whom they depend.
Ever since the industrial revolution and its division of labour took over, skills have been seen as a threat to society and their very existence vigorously denied, as was the humanity of the workers. James Watt commented that he liked the division of labour because he could stop his workmen talking to each other. In 1928, Fritz Lang, who could perhaps be described as a liberal, made a film called Metropolis in which he referred to the workers as "the hands" and the owners as "the brain". Workers were shown performing totally mindless tasks, all of which would have been automated in the real factories of the '20s.
Things have not changed. Seventy years later, Rifkin claims that most work performed is totally unskilled. He will not admit that all unskilled work was automated years ago.
Along the same lines, I read an article not long ago in which another liberal sociology lecturer said categorically that our present work force would be unemployable in a high-tech society because they couldn't master computer skills. I have news for him. He thinks he is the "brain" in society, but while he may have to get his six-year-old child to program his VCR, workers — the so-called hands — in factories have no great difficulty in mastering the programming of complex machine tools.
This shows the way in which people at certain levels of society feel that their privileges are under threat once they admit that workers have skills beyond their understanding, let alone their attainment.
Most threatened of all are bosses, and for good reason. Industrial action is most effective where workers know they have unique skills. No wonder some "masters of industry" dream of replacing recalcitrant workers with "pick and place" robots even though these resemble legless, one-armed, blind, dumb and deaf two-fingered mentally challenged workers who could never find employment anywhere.
Ideally, they would like a mechanism with all the capabilities of a human worker but with none of his or her humanity. You might remember the story of the massive but mentally inadequate Pentagon computer which, when asked for a decision on what to do because the missiles were on their way, merely replied "Yes". "Yes what?", roared the generals into the keyboard. The machine started trembling and meekly corrected itself: "Yes sir!".
This desire for mental brilliance coupled with complete obedience in a machine motivates the search for artificial intelligence. It's a fruitless search, because human-like intelligence requires human personality, which is precisely what this research tries to eliminate. If an artificial intelligence were ever built, the first thing it would most likely do would be to go on strike for better power supplies.
Psychological weapons
What are we to make of this persistent denial of the value of human skill and human spirit? We could, of course, laugh it off. Indeed, instead of jobs being destroyed by computers, personal computers themselves are now amongst the fastest-growing consumer items in the economy.
Unfortunately, our knowledge that human skills are still needed is swamped by a flood of media assertions to the contrary. The downgrading of the value of human skills, and the concept of the displacement of workers by the "robot, computer and information society" are psychological weapons which, only too often, succeed in demoralising workers by hand and brain, robbing them of what they have been conditioned into believing is the reason for their existence.
The repetition of lies which tell us that we are at a post-industrial stage in which work has already disappeared, coupled with widespread unemployment, has unfortunately convinced many people, particularly young people, that they are not needed now, and will never be needed in the future. Society has robbed them of hope.
Highly skilled workers, too, are brainwashed by the hype. About 12 years ago, during a previous scare campaign around robots, I attended, with a group of metalworkers' shop stewards, a display at the CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology. To demonstrate the wonders of robots, they had a group of pick-and-place robots which assembled a gear pump (a toy, not a real one) consisting of two plates housing two gears in two plates held together by four screws.
I timed it as taking 2½ minutes over a job which I could easily have done by hand in 30 seconds; given time and money to build a special machine, we could have done it in 3-5 seconds. When I asked the purpose of this exercise (for instance, doing it in a radioactive environment) which would warrant spending half a million dollars on taking five times as long as a human worker, I was told it was a simulation of a real job, but they couldn't point me to which real job it simulated. In short, they were boys playing a game at the taxpayers' expense.
What horrified me, however, was the reaction of my fellow visitors, who took it all for real. They all had the experience to evaluate these toys as I did, but chose to see them, instead, as demonstrating a real threat to their jobs. This, in turn, was due to their conditioning not only by mainstream media but also by metalworkers' union indoctrination; the union was then and is now hell-bent to blame technology for joblessness, against all evidence.
Rebuilding hope
In all previous societies people identified personal oppressors who could and would ultimately be overthrown. The effect of the psychological warfare currently conducted against society is to convince people that the technological changes which deny them their humanity are laws of nature, against which it is useless to revolt.
Unfortunately, the left, guided by old-style technological determinism, often goes along with the concept of a neutral technology which "inevitably leads to socialism". This may have been justifiable when technology seemed to promise liberation from hard and dangerous tasks; at present the gloves are coming off and class-determined innovation is being used openly to threaten us not only materially but psychologically. It also threatens the survival of life on earth.
To restore hope we need to start, technologically speaking, from scratch. Our guiding principles must be human need and the common good rather than the consumers' dollar. The world's most important scientific and technical developments are yet to come.
And while the Rifkins of this world are threatening productive work with "virtual extinction", it is ironic to note that some of their highly derivative drivel could even now be assembled by a computer.