"The Iron Horse" Themes: Automation · 5:34pm Apr 23rd, 2016
I meant to discuss this right after the Applejack arc "Apple Computer" of The Iron Horse, but things got in the way, it got delayed and pushed back, and so I haven't quite had the time to sit down and discuss it until now. However, I consider it to be one of the more important recurring themes of the story, especially with regard to characters like Celestia and Applejack, and, of course, to Turing Test.
So, ladies and gents, let's discuss it more plainly. Let's talk about automation and, most importantly, its inevitability.
First, let's just lay out terms. "Automation," in the simplest terms, means doing a task with little or no human intervention by replacing them with machines, e.g. robots. It's not a new idea, of course; it's existed about as long as we've had complex machines. You probably know the term "Luddite." And you probably know it comes from laborers protesting their jobs being taken by machines. But you probably also think it came from the late 19th century... and you'd be wrong. The term actually came into use between 1811 and 1816.
It's also easy to categorize fears about technology as paranoid naysaying. Indeed, early on in the story, a lot of readers of The Iron Horse were outright treating Celestia as a "villain." My intention was to make her an "antagonist," yes, but I think a lot of folks missed that she really had a point about technology, even if she was a bit unfair in her judgment of Turing Test as a thing, rather than a being.
People tend to think labor-saving technology is automatically good. Eli Whitney certainly thought his cotton gin would negate the need for people to toil away picking seeds out of cotton, but instead it meant that cotton was just more practical to harvest, so we could harvest more and make a mint, if only we had more labor... more cheap labor...
Oh. Ohhhh.
But let's bring this up to today. For the most part, technology really is great. As much as I hate having to tell my students to put their cell phones away in class and pay attention, I'm not going to deny their usefulness. I use mine all the time. Just yesterday, in fact, the power went out in my house for an entire day after the massive storm we had here in Houston, and my phone was my line to the outside world. Facebook, texts, weather reports, etc. all kept me from feeling totally cut off, and that's to say nothing of GPS, email, or all the other things I use it for. And that's just one device! Heck, I now have achieved my childhood dream of having a robot in my house to do stuff for me! Her name is Rosie, and she has made it so my floors are clean without me having to vaccuum for over a year.
Pictured: Rosie, or a bot just like her.
However, that's the little stuff. We're now getting specialized robots and machines that can do lots of stuff we used to need people to do. Driving cars is just one of those things. Google's Self-Driving Cars are already better at driving than we are, and they're just going to get better. Car crashes kill thousands, and I mean tens of thousands of people a year just here in the US of A alone. Imagine a world where we react to car crash news with the same shock and horror that we now do to airplane crashes! (Short sidebar here: airplanes really are way way way safer than cars; we freak out at them because they're so spectacular, but also so rare... one or two planes crash a year and even then most people survive them, compared to car crashes, which are an everyday occurrence.)
And yet, in that same stroke, you're also imagining a world where the truck driver, taxi driver, ambulance driver, heck, even the Uber driver are all as archaic as the milkman. (I grew up reading books that mentioned the milkman... and I have never seen a milkman!)
Transportation is a major industry right now, employing millions. But soon - very soon - it will be dead because you can replace the drivers with safe, efficient, cost-effective Smart Cars.
There's more on this and why it's an issue worth discussing, but I'm only going to go into the short version of it. If you want the long version, however, here's one of my favorite videos on the subject, which I have linked before, but one more time won't hurt. 
Short version: if you have a job, robots will probably be able to do it better than you at some point. That's not just me being arrogant, either; my own job as an English as a Second Language teacher could, and probably will, eventually get replaced by automated means. As soon as it's more efficient than you and/or more cost-effective, the robot gets your job.
Of course, that has consequences, both economical and social.
The economic consequences should be pretty obvious: a population where an increasingly large number of people are unemployed by virtue of being unemployable would be disastrous, at least in our current system. And that's not just for people who are jobless, since an economy where people have no money will go stagnant. Producers of goods and services can't continue without people to buy those goods and services. This is a problem we're going to have to deal with.
One solution that I regard as likely is the concept of Universal Basic Income. Basically it means that the government pays you a baseline salary just for being a citizen; just for being alive. Below is a video that explains it pretty succinctly.
Okay, so let's imagine that scenario: you never have to work, you get paid a nice, tidy sum of money for doing nothing, and you have all the free time you like. On one hand, it sounds like a never-ending dream vacation: pursue your hobbies, do charity, travel, or learn new skills at your leisure? It sounds great, and potentially, it is! But on the other hand, you start to wonder what a society where that is true for everyone will look like.
This brings us to the social consequences and, finally, to Applejack and the theme of her arc.
Imagine this simple, common scenario: you meet someone new. Like I said, simple. Nothing special. Now within the first minute of conversation, what do they tell you about themselves or, in turn, what do you tell them about yourself? I'm willing to bet that you'll mention your name, your home (hometown), and your job. If it's not one of the first three things you talk about, I'd be very surprised if it's not in the first five. The point is this: your job, or rather, your career, is part of your identity.
It certainly is part of Applejack's identity, at least. Throughout the series, AJ is shone to pride herself on her work, to enjoy it, and to identify herself as a hardworking, dependable pony. In The Iron Horse, she is in denial about her Bucker's Hips, a condition which, while not debilitating, will knock her down from being superhumanequine to merely being at the top of her game. Yet Applejack is prideful and not prone to accepting her limitations, and that extends to her physical limitations and facing the reality that she's going to get old someday and, at last, not be able to work in the orchard any longer. Already a vulnerable state of mind, to say the least.
And then along comes Turing Test: stronger, faster, able to work tirelessly, and able to do AJ's job better than she ever could even at her peak. With her identity already in doubt, a robot trivializes all that AJ had achieved. When the thing that makes you special is suddenly replaceable, how must that feel? What would you do if your very best was no longer good enough? What would you do if you couldn't be you any longer?
It was in this arc that I noticed more readers suddenly becoming more sympathetic to Celestia. All of a sudden, people realized that her fears about machines replacing ponies might not be so unreasonable or paranoid after all. And, again, this is a problem we're going to have to face as well.
We often complain about our jobs and look forward to the weekend, but a job well done is often a source of satisfaction, and even if we hate our jobs, we at least take some pride in providing for our families or having some independence in supporting ourselves. My first job, waaay back when I was 14 years old, was working as a paper carrier. It was a pain in the butt on rainy days and I had to get up every single day at 5 am without paid days off, but I took pride in the responsibility and having my own money for the first time. I learned a lot from the experience, and these days I wonder how things might have been different if I hadn't had the opportunity. Well, the day may come relatively soon where a generation of kids will be born that never have that first job; where they never have any job.
What will that world look like? Not just in terms of politics or economics, but in terms of society: when people no longer have jobs or careers, how will they establish their identity? In a small scale, we can already see examples of people dealing with the issue, such as when people retire and don't quite know what to do with themselves, or when lottery winners quit their job and, again, aren't sure what to do next.
Well, in a way, I've already included my own answer in the story. When Turing Test hears how her own actions have hurt Applejack, she replays the conversations she had with AJ's family. It turns out that Turing Test isn't really a replacement after all - she's doing Applejack's job, but she can't really take AJ's place or negate the importance she has just by being there supporting her family. AJ makes peace with her issue because she realizes she's still relevant in other ways, even if she's not the ultimate apple-bucker. To borrow a line from Fight Club, "You are not your job."
And I think that's ultimately how we'll deal with the problem: we'll find strength and value in our personal relationships, our families, and perhaps in solving the longstanding problems that have plagued society, like poverty, hunger, and disease. Assuming we don't live in a dystopian society with mass unemployment and crap slave wage jobs like in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, I think we'll be okay.
Not what I meant.
Well, sorry for the longish rant, but I really wanted to discuss the issue, and I'd love to hear what all of you think. Agree? Disagree? Alternate ideas? Post them below!
Now, one last thing I should mention is that a lot of the learning I've had about this issue has come from one particularly helpful reader, JFalk. Given his assistance, as well as that of reader ArtichokeLust, I've decided to list both as Technical Consultants for the story. Thank you, gentlemen!
I plan to share lots of JFalk's helpful links and articles in a separate post in the future. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I do. In the meantime, here are a few of the ones he's shared with me on this particular subject, as well as one of my own.
JFalk's Links:
-IFL: Report Finds Rise Of Artificial Intelligence Could Spark Mass Unemployment And Inequality
-An example of a reliable robot doing human labor: "Watch the Next Generation Atlas Robot Get Bullied By A Mean Human (And Stay On His Feet)"
-Gizmodo: Americans Think the Robot Revolution Is Coming But Not For Their Jobs
-The Guardian: The last job on Earth: imagining a fully automated world (video)
And here's the one I found all by myself!:
-Ross Scott (the guy who did the Machinima "Freeman's Mind") responds to Humans Need Not Apply (video)
One thing about automation that you failed to mention is that it also creates jobs as well. Maybe not as many as it replaces, but somebody has to keep the machines from breaking down and root out all of the bugs in the code before something goes horribly wrong. Even if we make 'bots to automate the process, we'd still need people to keep an eye on those, and so on ad infinitum.
I get most of my income from patreon and have never had a "real" job. I think I'm doing fairly well...
3891207 Pulling in $70 per chapter, I'd say that's decent. Still, I wouldn't exactly call that a career; eventually the fandom will peter out, after all.
Furthermore, if I'm reading this right, you've updated 4 times this month, so that's $280 for the month of April so far. That's not really enough to sustain oneself independently. The poverty threshold is $11,945 annually. To do that as a job and just stay above the poverty line, you'd need to write 170 chapters a year. And even the paltry federal minimum wage work can make about $15,000 a year, assuming no major emergencies occur.
Still, I have to admit, it'd be nice to get paid for writing fanfics. You're pretty lucky in that respect!
3891205 Well, I didn't mention it because the math doesn't really work out, for one thing. For every job we lose to robots, we're not going to gain another job. If we're being very generous, it might be that we'll get, say, 1 job for every 10 jobs we lose. And that's not enough to go around.
For another, you're also assuming we'd need a full-time employee for each robot. We probably wouldn't. Think of it like this: if you have 50 robots working in your factory, you might want, say, three maintenance robots. Well, rather than have more robots to maintain them in turn, why not have the maintenance robots check each other. Heck, if they can maintain the assembly line bots, they can probably maintain their fellow maintenance bots. You'd only need a human for specialized cases or a sudden emergency where all the maintenance droids somehow all were malfunctioning. You wouldn't even need the human on a regular basis! He'd be on standby most of the time.
Great text!
And thanks for the honour!
Technology over the last century has leapt forward faster than it has in the last thousand years. Quick example:
My grandfather milked cows by hand.
My father (and I) milked cows with a 3-place milking parlor and automatic milking machines that we attached to the cow's udder (after washing) and sent the milk through a pipe over to a 300 gallon bulk tank in the other room. We milked Grade A for close to thirty years.
I don't milk cows. I troubleshoot computers, but if I DID milk cows, it would be with one of these VMS automatic milking machines.
Hmmm...
This is indeed a deep question. I would like to think that America as a society would lean more towards the most ideal possibility of universal basic income, but given my work experience, I'm afraid I'd have to disagree.
One of my jobs is at the local newspaper. I catch papers off of the insert machine, count them, and either strap them out for delivery or stack them to run through the machine again. The home office of the company that owns the newspaper is based in New York. Why am I saying all this? To build a foundation. Those people in New York?
They don't really care what I do.
They don't care who I am.
Why? Simple. They're more concerned with what is immediately around them. Forms they have to fill out, articles they have to submit, deadlines that have to be met, etc.
Now, what about the people around my job?
Some of them care. My co-workers care because they're nice, my assistant manager cares because that's part of his job, and my manager cares that I get my job done and keep my mouth shut. I've been here for over a year, haven't gotten a raise, and twice we were supposed to get bonus checks: once this past Christmas, and once in summer of last year. We received neither. No explanations, no apologies, nothing.
Okay, enough ranting.
Granted, this is just one example. There are millions more like it and completely opposite from it.
American society is full of contradictions, divisions, and extremes. However, it is also full of potential. What the people who bring about this change, as well as those who monitor and maintain it, do with it will be up to them, for good or ill.
All that to say... I would hope the best comes out of a change like this. But I won't expect it to happen.
-Ru
Oh, I'm here again... Do I show up too frequently?
I just wanted to say... Automation. Things may happen. Various things.
Jobs may disappear. That's... not bad. Don't you remember your childhood? I didn't care about money, because money was never an issue. My dad worked, and I didn't get things bought only because my parents would tell me "no". Not because money was little. On nice days they would allow me to ask for stuff. So I grew up not a naughty kid. I dreamt of cool things I had not, sure, but overall my childhood was happy and sun-lit!..
Yes. My parents nurtured me. I only had to enjoy life... Sure, disappointments happened... Chores, morals, obligations... kindergarten... school... homework... Yeah, sometimes even punishments for letting my parents down. But I didn't even consider getting a job, until I was 19.
See? People can do well without a job! So we must not worry ourselves about a future, where machines have "stolen" jobs from us. Of course no one would pay us, because they'd got the machines to work for them, but robots wouldn't get paid too! They'd be mere tools! If one doesn't spend money to produce things, that one doesn't need to get them from selling! So what does one do with a lot of products he doesn't need in so huge amounts?
He-heh. Time to learn from Rarity
!
Let us be honest here: capitalism is NOT an answer. With robots there is no point in working for oneself only. It will no more be "do it yourself or give money". Rather it may be "robots do it, you get it". A slave community, where people are the masters with the robots being slaves.
Wonderful, would it not be? People used to practise slavery, but they enslaved other people. Unfair? Eventually. Though some slaves used to be happy to have their master. But with robots people may stop enslaving other people and start enslaving robots! They can make slaves at their leisure!
"Robot" is from Czech, meaning smth. along the lines of "slave", you know that?
Need I remind, when money is not an issue, one doesn't need a job. Children, for example, don't. Even when starving. Parents will provide, no?
Now imagine, if you have no job. You say, one's job is part of one's identity. Look at this: children have no job, and yet they know, who they are. Let's suppose they've determined their calling in life. They learn, they do what they enjoy doing. Maybe, even professionally. Sure, no one employs them, as they mature...
Well, they will have a "job". They can learn to do things. They shan't get paid for what they do, but money would become gratuitous! So technically even in a wholly automated world people will have what we define as jobs, only they don't work at such jobs! So socially it all shall be fine! People "employ" themselves, "work" for themselves, they only don't pay themselves, for they get their reward. And robots? They make our lives a childhood: they nurture us.
A happy cartoonish world indeed!..
...Wait, who controls the robots
?..
Y-yeah
, before going crazy with technological advancements we have first to change our society 
...