Feral Historian
Published 4 Jul 2025Harlan Ellison’s screenplay adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot is arguably the best sci-fi movie never made. Let’s take a look at the script itself, why the film was never made, and how it might have altered science fiction cinema in the wake of Star Wars.
00:00 Intro
01:59 Robbie
04:32 A Little Detour
06:18 A Lifetime and a Galaxy
12:12 Liar
14:06 A New Theory
16:29 The Rapid Rise of the Federation
21:01 Obstacles and Ellison
(more…)
November 13, 2025
I, Robot: The Ellison Script
Comments Off on I, Robot: The Ellison Script
October 20, 2025
QotD: Wanting to be a pet, not an adult human
Sagu @Sagutxis
Seeing so many men happy to replace us with robots is very blackpilling nglI didn’t go to college until I was 30. This gave me a chance to see it with the perspective of an adult.
One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget.
The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics.
For example, “maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys”, instead of “be cheerful and upbeat”, or even “interact positively with customers”.
This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable. A job is to do something, not be something.
Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise.
He asked the female students to come up with a job description for “husband”. At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions.
But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way.
And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns.
Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc.
They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears.
And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn’t the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to.
It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities.
These women didn’t want to be wives. They wanted to be pets.
What’s a pet? Well a pet is not a wife, or a friend. A pet is a creature of instinct, which you bring into your home because you like how it naturally behaves.
You get a cat because you want [it] to behave like a cat, and do things a cat naturally does, like play with string, and purr when you pet him. If he’s smart, he’ll adapt [to] you somewhat, but he doesn’t have responsibilities other than “be a cat”.
If you get a wife, you get a wife so she will do things for you, specific things that are the responsibilities of wife, like care for your home, bear and raise your children, cook nutritious meals so you don’t have to eat processed slop, look after your emotional well-being, and so on.
These girls didn’t want to be held responsible for those things. As married women, they might have anticipated doing some of them, but some of the time. When they felt like it.
The cat chases the string if and when it wants to, not because chasing the string is its job.
These young millennial women didn’t realize it, but they wanted to be pets. And that’s what they were in their college relationships. They hung out with guys when they wanted to, had sex with them when they wanted to, broke up with them for someone new when they wanted to.
Their relationships had no element of reciprocal responsibilities. They were perfectly at home with the idea of men having responsibilities to them, but they would repay those men if they chose, and how they chose, not how the men actually wanted.
And as I’ve said twice already, someone you have responsibilities to, but who has none to you, is a pet, or a child.
The reason that a significant portion of men want to invent sentient feminine robots so that they can marry them is because they want wives, and they have given up on the possibility of young women re-embracing the concept of sex roles and actually having to do something for someone else.
Women didn’t spontaneously became more selfish than previous generations, of course. They were the targets of a concerted psyop whose purpose was to convince them that female responsibilities were demeaning. It was tailored to their unique psychological vulnerabilities, and they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
Who mounted that psyop, and why, is a conversation most of us aren’t ready for yet.
But our point for today is don’t worry, young ladies.
The robots aren’t being brought in to replace you.
Just to do the jobs you won’t do.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-18.
Comments Off on QotD: Wanting to be a pet, not an adult human
February 5, 2021
QotD: Misunderstanding the threat/promise of robotics and AI
So, start with the very basics. Human desires and needs are unlimited – that’s an assumption but a reasonable one. There’re some number of people on the planet. This provides us with a lot of human labour but not an unlimited amount. Thus labour is a scarce or economic resource – and we’ve not enough of it to sate all human desires and wants.
OK, so, now we use machines to do some jobs that were previously done by humans. Imagine that this new technology actually required more human labour – that it created new jobs in greater volume than those it destroys. Say, the tractor and combine harvester industry needs more people in it than we used to use to cut the crops by hand. We’ve just made ourselves poorer. We used to have some amount of grain through the labour of some number of people. We’ve now got that grain but by using the labour of more people. We’ve used more of our scarce resource and we’re now poorer by the loss of what they used to make when not hand cutting grain but now no longer are by making tractors.
What makes us richer is if the tractor industry has record production statistics while using less labour than the hammer and sickle. That means that some human labour is now free to go off and try to sate a human desire or want for something other than grain. Ballet dancing for example. We’re now richer – tractors and combine harvesters have made us richer – by whatever value we put on more ballet dancing.
The entire point of any form of automation is to destroy jobs so as to free up that labour to do something else. The new technology doesn’t create jobs, it allows other jobs to be done.
The only point at which this fails is if human needs and desires aren’t unlimited. Which means that we might be able to provide everything that everyone wants without us all working. Which doesn’t really sound like much of a problem really.
Tim Worstall, “As Usual, World Economic Forum Gets Robots And AI Wrong Over Jobs”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-09-18.
January 28, 2021
Blade Runner 1921?! – Robot Apocalypse Now | B2W: ZEITGEIST! | E.10 – Winter 1921
TimeGhost History
Published 27 Jan 20201Modern technology promises a lot, but it can also bring unprecedented horror. This season, the people of Czechoslovakia get to see that for themselves.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Mikołaj Uchman
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Mikołaj Cackowski
KlimbimSources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
Bibliotheque nationale de FranceIcons from The Noun Project:
– noun_Sound_3530255
– Microphone by Agung Cahyo sSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
“Epic Adventure Theme 3” – Håkan Eriksson
“I Am Unbreakable” – Niklas Johansson
“Waiting like the Storm” – Rand Aldo
“Le Chat Noir 1” – Martin Landh
“A Single Grain Of Rice” – Yi Nantiro
“Alleys of Buenos Aires” – Tiki Tiki
“Age Of Men” – Jo WandriniArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
1 day ago (edited)
Episode 10 of the series and for the first time we’re looking at a decidedly negative outcome that people imagined might come with further technological progress. Over 100 years later and it’s still something people are fearful of, and it often feels like Artificial Intelligence providing a real threat to humanity’s existence is just around the corner.We’d be interested to know what you guys all think. Is there a chance that something along the lines of what Čapek imagined actually happening? Let us know in the comments.
NOTE: Unfortunately an error has snuck into this week’s episode. The portrait that is supposed to show Herbert Hoover is in fact of his son, Herbert Hoover Jr. We are working on getting this fixed as fast as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.
Comments Off on Blade Runner 1921?! – Robot Apocalypse Now | B2W: ZEITGEIST! | E.10 – Winter 1921
July 26, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Laws of Robotics – Extra Sci Fi – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 24 Jul 2018Asimov is famous for coining the Three Laws of Robotics, but to him they weren’t the “answer” to how robots could be used in the future — they were an intentional reflection of humanity’s potential failings.
Comments Off on Isaac Asimov – Laws of Robotics – Extra Sci Fi – #2
May 9, 2018
Royal Navy buys the Terminator … of mines
At The Register Gareth Corfield updates us on the latest step towards Skynet, uh, Seanet:
The Navy’s latest robot minesweeper. It’ll blow things up but leave your pint alone, thankfully
The Royal Navy has acquired a search-and-destroy robot boat intended for destroying mines.
A first for Britain’s naval service, the roboat, built by German firm Atlas Elektronik’s UK subsidiary, drives itself around the high seas towing three auxiliary boats fitted with electro-acoustic transmitters. The transmitters generate pings that trigger modern digital mines at a safe distance from either the roboat flotilla or actual human-carrying shipping.
So far the MoD’s £13m contract with Atlas has netted it one complete boat-with-gear system on an R&D basis, with options available to buy more. The trials boat has just been handed over to the RN following proving of the design’s detect-and-avoid algorithms in what appears to be a live training data-versus-AI comparison exercise.
In maritime terms, the roboats comply with the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea (known as the Colregs – they’re the seagoing version of the Highway Code), though The Register would be most intrigued to see how they cope with scenarios that end up invoking rule 2(b).*
“This autonomous minesweeper takes us a step closer to taking our crews out of danger and allowing us to safely clear sea lanes of explosives, whether that’s supporting trade in global waters and around the British coastline, or protecting our ships and shores,” said defence procurement minister Guto Bebb in the usual canned quote.
* Rule 2, as published (PDF) by the Department for Transport, states: “Construing and complying with these Rules due regard shall be had to all dangers of navigation and collision and to any special circumstances, including the limitations of the vessels involved, which may make a departure from these Rules necessary to avoid immediate danger.”
Update, 14 May: UK Armed Forced Commentary has more information on the unmannned minesweeper system.
12 October 2005 was an historic day for the Royal Navy, because the Hunt class minesweepers HMS Middleton and HMS Ledbury conducted the last evolution at sea involving sweep gear, both the Oropesa mechanical wire system and the combined influence sweep equipment. The Royal Navy at that point had already operated unmanned, remotely controlled sweep systems in 2003 during waterway clearance work in Iraq, notably the opening of Umm Qasr. Under a UOR, a number of Combat Support Boats with remote controls were used to tow the Mini Dyad System (MDS) produced by Australian Defence Industries (ADI) and Pipe Noise Makers. Called Shallow Water Influence Minesweeping System (SWIMS), they were sent ahead of the RN minehunters as precursor sweeps against ground influence mines. The future of MCM was taking the path of stand-off action through unmanned systems and it was felt that the more than 100 years of manned ships sweeping were at an end.
The replacement for the sweep equipment was to come through the Flexible Agile Sweeping Technology, or FAST. The idea was to put two unmanned surface vehicles on the Hunt class vessels by modifying their open, capacious stern area. FAST, however, proved anything but fast, and even though a contract was signed in 2007 by the MOD with the Atlas-QED consortium, comprising Atlas Elektronik UK, QinetiQ and EDO Corporation, the resulting Technology Readiness Demonstrator never made it on the Hunt class. FAST became a test platform that spent the following years doing all sort of trials and demonstrations. Initially intended only for towing sweep kit, it ended up testing remote deployment and recovery of Sea Fox unmanned underwater vehicles, demonstrating that stand off clearance of minefields was possible.
Atlas Elektronik UK continued to work with the MOD and on its own, and eventually developed in-house the ARCIMS (ATLAS Remote Combined Influence Minesweeping System) system, which has enjoyed a first export success in an unnamed Middle East navy and has gone on to become the much delayed replacement for the Hunt’s sweeping capability within the Royal Navy.
An ARCIMS seaframe, but manned, was delivered to the Royal Navy in 2014 for trials and development purposes, and remains in service with the Maritime Autonomous System Trials Team (MASTT) of the Royal Navy as RNMB Hazard.
On 6 march 2015, Atlas received a 12.6 million pounds order from the MOD for a first ARCIMS-derived system, in the unmanned configuration, configured to tow sweeping equipment. The system has now been accepted, and according to MASTT, which has already trialed it extensively, the new boat is called RNMB Hussar.
Comments Off on Royal Navy buys the Terminator … of mines
April 27, 2018
The rise of the “sexbot”
In Jacobite, Diana Fleischman discusses the appeal of sexbots to young (and not-so-young) men:
Sexbots are usually woman-shaped gynoid machines. At the present time, sex robots are simple: they’re silicone sex dolls that have some capacity for movement and response. Manufacturers are rolling out new models and new promises: sex robots that respond to touch and penetration, sex robots with interchangeable faces and bodies and sex robots with different personalities. Future robots will have all the allure of the cues of fertility in a flesh-and-blood woman combined with the artificial intelligence that creates compulsive reward directed behavior.
Sex robots are overwhelmingly gynoid because heterosexual men drive the market for sexual products like prostitution and pornography. Across cultures, men desire more sexual partners, need to know someone for less time before they want to have sex with them, and have lower standards for a sexual liaison than women. Looking at gay men is instructive here. Their sexual interactions are not limited by women’s sexual choosiness and they, on average, have many more sexual partners than straight men or lesbians.
It isn’t hard to see the reason for this. Men don’t get pregnant and don’t lactate, and they have smaller, easier-to-produce sex cells than women. For a man, the cost of producing offspring is cheap. Getting one’s genes into the next generation is the engine of evolution. The low opportunity costs make men motivated to take every opportunity, even if it comes in the form of a robot. Ever think a dog is dumb for growling at his reflection in the mirror? Human men can become aroused looking at flat images of nude women in black and white, our evolved psychology can respond in maladaptive ways towards novel stimuli.
[…]
My view is that the uncanny valley is something analogous to Capgras delusion, a psychological disorder that causes sufferers to believe that someone they know has been taken over by an imposter, often inhuman. According to VS Ramachandran, there are two aspects to recognizing faces: the identification of the external familiar representation and the “internal” validation – the warm emotion that goes along with it. In the uncanny valley, you recognize a robot as humanlike, but it’s missing the facial movement or some other characteristic that gives you a warm feeling of recognition. Many men won’t experience the uncanny valley, especially with regards to sex robots. These men are going to be the early adopters. Men are worse at identifying faces than women and are far more likely to have prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.
Sex is weird. Sex is gross and awkward. Natural selection addressed this issue by causing arousal to attenuate the human disgust response. It’s worth noting that men have a much lower baseline sexual disgust than women, and that sexual excitement further reduces disgust sensitivity in men. In a classic paper by Dan Ariely, aroused men had much more positive attitudes about all kinds of unusual sexual acts. Sexually aroused men were more likely to say that it would be fun to watch a woman urinating or that they could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal). 3-D pornography of video game or cartoon characters that might be creepy in a nonsexual context are popular genres. The most direct evidence that men won’t be put off by uncanny vulvas is from a paper that laments the “unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots” in comments on YouTube videos of robots. Bawdy comments on gynoids – “you’ll have to replace it monthly due to semen corrosion,” for example – were more frequent than comments expressing unease.
Perhaps we should encourage some men to use sex robots. Men who get environmental cues that they’re evolutionary dead-ends disproportionately menace society. In the 1980s, evolutionary psychologist couple Wilson and Daly found that perpetrators of violence and homicide had something in common: they were young, single and didn’t have access to the kinds of resources with which to win mates. Polygynous societies in which wealthier men have access to multiple women are more violent and less stable because they have a class of young men without the prospect of getting a mate. Monogamy, rather than being the state of nature, may have been an important cultural technology for reducing violence.
Comments Off on The rise of the “sexbot”
April 5, 2018
The Forgotten Foundations Part 2 – The History of Sci Fi – Extra Sci Fi – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 3 Apr 2018We’re gonna dive into the TRULY wacky and wild stories of early science fiction, including a Czech play that invented the word “robot.”
Comments Off on The Forgotten Foundations Part 2 – The History of Sci Fi – Extra Sci Fi – #5
March 16, 2018
Mostly Weekly Series Finale: Creative Destruction
ReasonTV
Published on 14 Mar 2018In the final episode of the webseries, we tackle how markets make and break stuff.
—–
In free and open markets people are able to make new technologies and business models, which displace older, established ones. That process of starting new companies and jobs destroys some professions while creating others.
It’s entirely understandable that people who lose their jobs want to keep them. But industries like manufacturing, coal mining, and mall retailers aren’t dying out because of competition from China, they’re being outmoded by automation, cheaper fuel sources, and online sales.
Despite the uncertainty that markets bring, they also create new jobs and entirely new professions. There aren’t gangs of unemployed lamplighters roaming the land; their descendants became Uber drivers, social media coordinators, and webseries producers.
In the end, it’s better for everyone to look at the world as it is and to move forward than to try and halt progress through the force of law.
Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.
Script by Andrew Heaton and Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Brian Sack.
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.
Comments Off on Mostly Weekly Series Finale: Creative Destruction
January 6, 2018
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs meets the blockchain
Tim Worstall explains why sensible economists aren’t worried about robots taking all our jobs:
CryptoKitties is also so new that it needs explanation. It works on blockchain, so it’s sexy (Bitcoin!), although there’s no great reason why it should. It’s simply a collectible, as much as cigarette, football or baseball cards were. AN Cat exists digitally, others do too, they can breed and, as in a pretty standard Mendelian model, attributes are inherited to varying degrees.
People are willing to spend real money on gaining the attributes they want. All the blockchain element is doing is keeping track of who owns what – a pretty good use for blockchain even if a payment system might not be, an ownership registry being a different thing.
Apparently, 180,000 people are into collecting CryptoKitties now, having spent some $20m of real-world resources on their fun.
And this is why economists aren’t worried about automation leaving us with nothing to do. Partly, it’s this inventiveness on display, the things that humans will find to do. Breeding digital cats? But much more than that, it’s about the definition of value.
And here’s where Maslow enters the discussion:
there’s something called Maslow’s pyramid, often known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We humans like our sleep, water, food and sex – and in roughly that order too. Only when one need earlier in the chain is at least partially sated will we get excited about finding more of the next. In a modern society most of these are well catered to, which is why we also desire, even demand, things further up the pyramid, such as TV shows, ballet, Simon Cowell, collectibles and so on.
It’s also true that economists insist this value is personal. It’s whatever value the individual places upon the whatever, market prices being the average of those summed. Just as we cannot say that one form of production creates more value than another, we cannot say that £10 of value in a collectible is lesser than £10 in food. We can, as in the pyramid, say that if the food desire isn’t partially sated then the collectible won’t be thought about, but order of desire isn’t the same as value.
All of which leads to “no worries she’ll be right” about automation. Say the robots do come in and steal all our jobs, and the algorithms do all the thinking – we’re not going to be left starving and bereft with nothing to do.
We’ll not be starving because the machines will now be doing everything. If they fail to do something as obvious as growing food, then we’ll all have jobs growing food. In fact, given the machines are making everything so efficient, we’ll all be stunningly rich – for all production must be consumed, that’s just an accounting identity.
But what are we going to do if we’ve not got those jobs? One answer is that we’ll start producing things further up the pyramid. More ballet, more poetry, more trifles like that. Why not? That’s what we’ve done every other time we’ve beaten the scarcity problem with more basic items, it’s the basis of civilisation. Only once we don’t need 100% of the people in the fields growing food can we have some portion of everyone off doing the civilisation bit.
But doesn’t this mean that we’re all going to end up doing terribly trivial things? Yep, it sure does. There are people out there making a very fine living from kicking a ball around, something that four centuries ago would have been considered total frivolity compared to growing food or chopping heads off enemies. The machine-driven future will have people doing what we today consider to be frivolous.
Comments Off on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs meets the blockchain
May 26, 2017
QotD: The coming of the sexbots
Recently I saw online a documentary on sex robots. The reporteress, a short-haired woman seething with quiet indignation, Viewed With Alarm the very idea. Progress is rapid on these love assistants, she said. They move. Some do, anyway. They talk, but not too much. Before long they will have skin-temperature silicone. Today we have all those deplorable men sitting home, lonely and isolated, choking their chickens and pondering suicide. Soon they will instead be rocking and rolling with Robo-Barbie. This worried her. She said.
If this be true, then why, one wonders, do men want sexbots? Aren’t there already women all over the place at skin temperature? Sez me, it’s because women have lived too long in a monopoly economy and so let down quality. It used to be that men had jobs and money, and women had that, so they married to let each get some of what the other had. The woman had to be agreeable as a selling point. Now women have jobs and don’t need men, or to be pleasant. Some are nice anyway, but it’s no longer a design feature. Of course they often end up old and alone with a cat somewhere on upper Connecticut Avenue, but they don’t figure this out until too late. Anyway, they stopped being agreeable. They learned from feminists that everything wrong in their lives was the fault of men.
It is a real problem: American women are inoculated from birth with angry misandry insisting that men are dolts, loutish, irresponsible, and only want sex. (To which a response might be, “Uh…What else have you got?”)
[…]
OK, back to sexbots. The short-aired reporteress wondered why men could be interested in such confections instead of real women, the tone being one of elevated moralism and horror. Beneath the usual factitious objectivity one could hear, “How could…what is wrong with….?” and so on.
In the documentary, the short-haired reporteress talked to an ugly anti-sexbot crusader woman who said testily that using sexbots “objectified women.” (To me it sounded more like womanizing objects, but never mind.) These two dragons continued to the effect that sex was about intimacy and closeness and bonding. I wondered how they knew. But understand: They weren’t worried about competition. Oh no. They wanted to preserve intimacy and bonding. They were worried about those poor miserable men.
Uh…yeah.
In modern America I see no sign that women are concerned about masculine misery, and indeed that most of them rather like the idea.
Fred Reed, “Sally Cone Hits the Dating Scene”, The Unz Review, 2017-05-11.
Comments Off on QotD: The coming of the sexbots
April 6, 2017
Words & Numbers: Taxing Robots Does Not Compute
Published on 5 Apr 2017
This week, Antony and James break down Bill Gates’ recent suggestion that companies that use robots instead of human workers should pay employment taxes in order to fund new welfare programs.
February 1, 2017
May 9, 2015
Everybody panic! The robots are coming to steal our jobs!
Tim Worstall explains why we can easily disregard the calls to panic about the impending invasion of our new robotic overlords:
Essentially, what [economist Joe] Stiglitz is saying is that under certain conditions the advance of the robots means that we all lose our jobs and the capitalists, the people who own the robots, get to have all of the economy. And one can see his mechanism to get there: if robots become ever more productive then yes, we can see the idea that there will be more robots and fewer people employed by the capitalists and so on. But it’s still impossible for that end state to arrive: simply because we non-capitalists aren’t going to let it.
[…]
So, let’s recast that end state. There’s the 1% (the plutocrats, the capitalists, whatever) and then there’s us, the 99%. Robots become ever more productive and we the 99% all lose our jobs working for the capitalists. Hmm, tant pis in one telling of this story because as Karl Marx pointed out that’s a precondition for true communism, that we overcome the scarcity problem. But even leaving that aside what is going to happen next?
That 1% owns all the robots and gets all the production from them. We, the 99%, have no jobs and thus no incomes. We cannot purchase any of that robotic consumption from the capitalists. This is the very point that Stiglitz is making, that the capitalists will own and consume 100% of the robotic output. Well, yes, OK, but what are we the 99% going to do? This new peasantry: do we all just wander around the fields until we keel over from starvation? No, quite obviously we don’t. Sure, the robots are more efficient than we are, produce things for much lower prices. But we don’t have any of the currency with which we can buy that production. So, what are we going to do?
Comments Off on Everybody panic! The robots are coming to steal our jobs!
March 26, 2014
Minimum-wage jobs becoming more likely to be replaced by robots
Everyone seems to want to raise the minimum wage right now (well, everyone in the media certainly), but it might backfire spectacularly on the very people it’s supposed to help:
It’s become commonplace for computers to replace American workers — think about those on an assembly line and in toll booths — but two University of Oxford professors have come to a surprising conclusion: Waitresses, fast-food workers and others earning at or near the minimum wage should also be on alert.
President Obama’s proposal to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour could make it worthwhile for employers to adopt emerging technologies to do the work of their low-wage workers. But can a robot really do a janitor’s job? Can software fully replace a fast-food worker? Economists have long considered these low-skilled, non-routine jobs as less vulnerable to technological replacement, but until now, quantitative estimates of a job’s vulnerability have been missing from the debate.
Based on a 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of Oxford [PDF], occupations in the U.S. that pay at or near the minimum wage — that’s about one of every six workers in the U.S. — are much more susceptible to “computerization,” or as defined by the authors, “job automation by means of computer-controlled equipment.” The researchers considered a time frame of 20 years, and they measured whether such jobs could be computerized, not whether these jobs will be computerized. The latter involves assumptions about economic feasibility and social acceptance that go beyond mere technology.
The minimum-wage occupations that Frey and Osborne think are most vulnerable include, not surprisingly, telemarketers, sales clerks and cashiers. But also included are occupations that employ a large share of the low-wage workforce, such as waiters and waitresses, food-preparation workers and cooks. If the computerization of these low-wage jobs becomes feasible, and if employers find it economical to invest in such labor-saving technology, there will be huge implications for the U.S. labor force.
H/T to Colby Cosh, who said “McDonald’s is going to turn into vending machines. Can’t say this enough. McDonald’s…vending machines.”
Comments Off on Minimum-wage jobs becoming more likely to be replaced by robots
