Robots and Communism

There have been a bunch of blog posts from the liberal bloggers I frequent recently about robots. Specifically, the apparently-growing trend toward replacing human workers with robots. Matt Yglesias, in particular, thinks that this is a good thing, that will allow society to shift human resources into other sectors like health care and education, where actually having people in the room matters, without losing material plenty. Kevin Drum, who started this particular debate, and Paul Krugman, who just added his two cents to it, focus more on the negative disruptive aspects. I'm going to focus on one particular little throw-away line at the end of Krugman's post, where he mentions that the capital/labor dimension of inequality has "echoes of old-fashion Marxism" as one reason why it hasn't gotten much attention from mainstream economists.



The point here is that the problem with Marxism isn't exactly that it's fundamentally wicked but that it doesn't work. If you try to implement its policies, like severing the link between how much material plenty a person is allowed to enjoy and how much work that other people are willing to pay them they do, you find out that nobody gets much material plenty anymore. And that's bad! But that doesn't mean that there's anything fundamentally Good about the policy of impoverishing those who don't or can't find a way to do work that they'll be well-compensated for. (Marxism in particular has a lot of other weird stuff about the "alienation of labor" that's a bit less consequentialist in focus thrown in, but one can imagine constructing a slightly different radical-egalitarian philosophy that's basically just about the stuff I just mentioned.)

But a key point of Marx's predictions, for he did view them as that, was that, in the future, the world would be so massively prosperous that you could afford the rather large decrease to social "productivity," i.e. how hard everyone's working to make stuff, which he admitted would happen under his scheme, and still have enough stuff to allow everyone to live in substantial material comfort. One way that I've expressed this point is that the condition under which Marxism or something like it could work would be if the supply of goods could still exceed the demand for goods given a price ceiling of $0 for everything. Standard economics says this should be impossible: if you ban paying for stuff, nobody will have any incentive to make anything but everyone will have every incentive to buy everything at that price. So the way I see it, in order to make this work you one of two things. You could massively alter human nature, such that people are a lot less greedy (and will therefore not demand as much stuff at the $0 price level) and a lot more willing to labor pro bono (and will therefore be able to supply stuff at the $0 price level).

Or, you could make it possible to supply stuff without human labor. The best theoretical way to think about all of this is just to take it to its logical extreme, the Star Trek-style matter replicators, which can just churn out stuff with no inputs (other than, presumably, a really massive amount of energy, a point they don't seem to address much in the show--so let's ignore it!). In a world with widespread replicators, the supply of stuff at a price of $0 really would be substantially positive. Since it's also true that demand at $0 is never really infinite, because it's just not possible to consume an infinite amount of stuff (for instance, consider the case of food), in this world it would be genuinely conceivable that you could eliminate paying for goods and still allow everyone to live in material prosperity.

Now, this would obviously be massively disruptive: all manufacturing jobs would disappear immediately! But given the part about "everyone gets to live in material prosperity," arguably the greatest benefits accrue to those who lose their jobs because of this: they still get the material prosperity, but they don't have to toil in factories to get it! And I think what you'd see is that society would shift its human resources toward stuff that it's genuinely beneficial to have a human do, either because you really can't replace people with machines in that context without genuine losses (like in education) or because people find those activities personally fulfilling (like all sorts of arts, or, in the Star Trek example, exploring the universe). There's a fair amount of overlap between those two categories, I think, which is useful.

The point here is that a "disruptive" development like the invention of replicators, or less powerful machines that move us part-way toward being able to generate lots and lots of stuff with less and less human labor, is only a bad thing if we remain stuck in the paradigm of tying people's standards of living to their employment. But that paradigm is not necessarily the natural order of things. Yes, the Marxist attempts to sever the link were ineffective on an economic level and tied in with all sorts of oppression at the political level, but that doesn't mean we have to reject the notion that the link is worth severing, some day. So all we need to do, as we progress toward being a society where the labor of people is not necessary for the maintenance of material prosperity, is opening ourselves to letting people not starve in the streets even if they don't have a paying job. This might go against the "Protestant work ethic" or whatever, but it will need to happen: the alternative is letting what should be a massive positive development become an absolute tragedy.