The Astral Mirror (7 page)

But these things are not done, not only because society cannot afford to have them done, but because the people who make up society learn that they can get along without doing them.

“Basically, I think it’s because we can’t afford them,” Albus insists. “Getting along without means scaling back your living standards.”

Taking a wider view, Albus says, “The world is filled with poverty, hunger, poor housing, poor education... there’s plenty of things that need to be done. The question is really, can we afford to do all these things?” Only to a very limited extent today are these problems being dealt with, mainly because poor nations and poor people cannot afford to solve them. Albus believes that if robots and their high productivity begin to create vast new sources of wealth for their owners, some of this wealth can be used to attack poverty and hunger around the world.

Albus sees this wealth being generated by an evergrowing number of robot workers. (Actually, the term “robot workers” is a redundancy.
Robot
is from a Czech word that means
worker.
The term was coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his 1920 play,
R.U.R.)
Today’s workforce of some 6000 robots is growing at a rate of about thirty-five percent per year. By the end of this decade, Albus and other robot experts see at least 100,000 robots in the United States, growing to a million by the turn of the century.

What does this mean to the twenty-or thirty-year-old human worker of today? It means unemployment, somewhere in the future, whether you like it or not.

“My guess,” says Albus, “is that they might get to retire a little earlier than they otherwise would. I don’t think anybody would be terribly upset about retiring at fifty-five instead of sixty-five.”

Living on a fixed retirement income for ten years longer than today’s pensioners? Sitting at home with nothing to do while the robots busily clank around
your
former workplace? That can be bad enough, but what about the people who have already been pushed into unemployment— not retirement—by robots and automation? Labor experts talk about the “structurally unemployed,” the people who will most likely never be rehired because they haven’t the skills to compete in the labor market and will not or cannot be retrained. They see a hard core of six and a half percent of the total human workforce as structurally (read, permanently) unemployed today. That’s more than six million men and women. And the number is expected to grow, not shrink.

How much wealth must the robots generate merely to absorb the unemployment they will be helping to cause? How can we dream of a robot-produced Utopia where no one is hungry or poor, when the earliest impact of robotics seems to mean wide-scale unemployment for humans?

But there is unemployment and unemployment, as a philosopher would say. If you drink in the corner saloon at ten in the morning you’re considered a bum; but if you drink at ten a.m. in the country club, you’re a golfer. The difference between the two is wealth. If the robots are going to generate so much wealth, how can society be arranged so that the workers dis-employed by robots get their fair share of the money?

Albus has been pondering this matter for as long as he has been designing robots, and has written books on the subject, including
People’s Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution.
“The primary mechanism for transferring wealth,” he says without hesitation, “is ownership.”

One of the ways in which employees can begin to
own
the robots which displace them is through Employee Stock Ownership Plans: ESOPs. Economist Louis O. Kelso, author (with Mortimer J. Adler) of
The Capitalist Manifesto
and
Finishing the Unfinished Capitalist Revolution,
hit upon the idea in the 1950s of having companies issue shares of their own stock to their employees as a kind of fringe benefit, an addition to or replacement for bonuses or retirement plans. Many companies have since started ESOPs, and some firms have even become totally owned by their employees. Albus believes that an ESOP-type plan could permit employees to attain ownership of a highly-automated firm, and thus gain a share of the profits generated by the robots.

Looking further into the future, Albus believes that the best way to handle the economic impact of the Second Industrial Revolution is for the government to create a National Mutual Fund.

Every citizen would be a shareholder in the NMF, receiving a share at age eighteen, by virtue of being an American citizen. The NMF would not obtain its investment funds directly from its shareholders, however. Instead, it would borrow investment capital from the Federal Reserve Bank. The amount borrowed would be huge, billions of dollars per year. Congress would have to decide on a ceiling, just as Congress now places a ceiling on the national debt.

The NMF would then invest its capital in high technology, robotics and automation, concentrating its efforts on modernizing industries that have become technologically backward.

“Specifically,” Albus says, “the NMF would attempt to promote the development of robots and automated factories and would provide supplemental worker’s compensation and retraining incentives where these would be necessary or useful.”

The profits coming back to the NMF from the increased productivity of the roboticized industries would be paid to the investors: the citizens of the U.S.A.

Albus emphasizes that, “NMF payments would
not
be welfare or charity based on need. They would be dividends paid to the shareholders of a profit-making institution.” As in any corporation, each share of stock would receive an equal share of the dividends.

In other words, the National Mutual Fund is a way of making a capitalist out of every American citizen, while at the same time providing funds for the robot revolution and distributing the profits equably.

Critics point out that the NMF’s borrowings from the Federal Reserve could cause enormous inflationary pressures on the economy. Albus replies that the government could control such pressures by giving a part of the NMF’s profits to its shareholders in the form of savings bonds, rather than cash. This would be a form of government-mandated forced savings which would remove spendable money from the marketplace, slow down the inflationary spiral, and even provide more capital for investment in the NMF.

Private citizens will be able to invest in the NMF on their own, of course. The share issued to a person at age eighteen (or at the initiation of the Fund) is only a beginning. Like any corporation or mutual fund, private investors will be able to buy more shares if they want to.

In essence, Albus’ plan would allow workers to retire whenever they were financially ready to, based on their income from the NMF rather than the salaries they receive from their jobs. Instead of drinking in the morning at the saloon, everyone can get into the country club.

Before the First Industrial Revolution, most men and women worked the land or toiled at hand crafts in their own homes. Cash money was very rare; payments were usually in kind. But with the advent of steam-powered factories, a new lifestyle came into being. People left their homes and went to a factory, or a mine, or an office. There they performed some service or helped to produce some goods. For this they received a wage, in money. Some two hundred years later, we have come to accept this way of life as normal and natural.

But it is no more “natural” than laboring from dawn to dusk behind a plow. If robots can produce the wealth that men such as Albus and Frosch foresee, our society may reach the point where most people need not depend on wages from jobs for their income: they will live on the dividends generated by robots that they own, in one form or another.

When? How soon before we can all sit by the poolside and watch the robots toiling away for us?

“Probably not in my lifetime,” says the fifty-year-old Albus, “or maybe late in my life. And quite probably it will start in some place like Scotland or New Zealand, some small democracy where people are not quite as afraid of the idea of socialism as we are.”

Robot welfare. Robot socialism. Is this the wave of the future? Certainly the robots are already causing deep and lasting changes in the patterns of employment in many manufacturing industries. And computers are generating vast changes in the white-collar world. The hope is that someday we will be able to share in the profits those robots and computers earn, perhaps through an ESOP or an NMF. But the fear is that we will be pushed aside by automation, dumped into the economic gutter because we can’t compete with the tireless, inhuman machines. For today, the choices seem to be either unemployment or retraining, upgrading skills to the point where we can live and work with the robots, or being shunted to the sidelines by them.

As usual, it is the science fiction writers who have thought about this problem the longest. In 1954 Jack Williamson wrote
With Folded Hands,
a deeply disturbing story about a future in which human-shaped robots become so clever, so ubiquitous, that they take over all the work in the world and prevent humans from doing any kind of task whatsoever. They literally kill the human race with kindness:

Alert and solicitous, the little black mechanical [robot] accompanied him down the shining corridor, worked the elevator for him, conducted him down to the car. It drove him efficiently back through the new and splendid avenues toward the magnificent prison of his home.

Sitting beside it in the car, he watched its small deft hands on the wheel, the changing luster of bronze and blue on shining blackness.

The final machine, perfect and beautiful, created to serve mankind forever. He shuddered....

“I’ve found out that I’m perfectly happy under the Prime Directive. Everything is absolutely wonderful.” His voice became very dry and hoarse and wild. “You won’t have to operate on me.”

The car turned off the shining avenue, taking him back to the quiet splendor of his prison. His futile hands clenched and relaxed again, folded on his knees. There was nothing left to do.

No one foresees that kind of dreary future coming out of the robot revolution. No one except the science fiction writers. But in the long run, they are usually right.

In the next two pieces of fiction, the Astral Mirror looks backward into history, fairly recent history. This pair of stories sheds some possible light on why a certain former President of the United States, and a certain former Secretary of State, behaved the way they did at critical junctures in their respective lives.

He stood at his bedroom window, gazing happily out at the well-kept grounds and manicured park beyond them. The evening was warm and lovely. Dinner with the guests from overseas had been perfect; the deal was going smoothly, and he would get all the credit for it. As well as the benefits.

He was at the top of the world now, master of it all, king of the hill. The old dark days of fear and failure were far behind him now. Everything was going his way at last. He loved it.

His wife swept into the bedroom, just slightly tipsy from the champagne.

Beaming at him, she said, “You were magnificent tonight, darling.”

He turned from the window, surprised beyond words. Praise from her was so rare that he treasured it, savored it like expensive wine, just as he had always felt a special glow within his breast on those extraordinary occasions when his mother had vouchsafed him a kind word.

“Uh... thank you,” he said.

“Magnificent, darling,” she repeated. “I am so proud of you!”

His face went red with embarrassed happiness.

“And these people are so much nicer than those Latin types,” she added.

“You... you know, you were... you
are...
the most beautiful woman in this city,” he stammered. He meant it. In her gown of gold lame and with her hair coiffed that way, she looked positively regal. His heart filled with joy.

She kissed him lightly on the cheek, whispering into his ear, “I shall be waiting for you in my boudoir, my prince.”

The breath gushed out of him. She pirouetted daintily, then waltzed to the door that connected to her own bedroom. Opening the door, she turned back toward him and blew him a kiss.

As she closed the door behind her, he took a deep, sighing, shuddering breath. Brimming with excited expectation, he went directly to his closet, unbuttoning his tuxedo jacket as he strode purposefully across the thickly carpeted floor.

He yanked open the closet door. A man was standing there, directly under the light set into the ceiling.

“Wha...?”

Smiling, the man made a slight bow. “Please do not be alarmed, sir. And don’t bother to call for your security guards. They won’t hear you.”

Still fumbling with his jacket buttons, he staggered back from the closet door, a thousand wild thoughts racing through his mind. An assassin. A kidnapper. A newspaper columnist!

The stranger stepped as far as the closet door. “May I enter your room, sir? Am I to take your silence for assent? In that case, thank you very much.”

The stranger was tall but quite slender. He was perfectly tailored in a sky-blue Brooks Brothers three-piece suit. He had the youthful, innocent, golden-curled look of a European terrorist. His smile revealed perfect, dazzling teeth. Yet his eyes seemed infinitely sad, as though filled with knowledge of all human failings. Those icy blue eyes pierced right through the man in the tuxedo.

“Wh... what do you want? Who are you?”

“I’m terribly sorry to intrude this way. I realize it must be a considerable shock to you. But you’re always so busy. It’s difficult to fit an appointment into your schedule.” His voice was a sweet, mild tenor, but the accent was strange: East Coast, surely. Harvard, no doubt.

“How did you get in here? My security...”

The stranger gave a slightly guilty grin and hiked one thumb ceilingward. “You might say I came in through the roof.”

“The roof? Impossible!”

“Not for me. You see, I am an angel.”

“A... angel?”

With a self-assured nod, the stranger replied, “Yes. One of the Heavenly Host. Your very own guardian angel, to be precise.”