Rebuilding With Robots

Glenn Thrush covers the revival of Pittsburgh:

The irony that a city built on an industrial working class has reclaimed part of its past industrial glory by developing machines designed, in some cases, to replace human workers is lost on exactly no one. Carnegie Robotics, a new CMU startup generating a lot of buzz, makes a machine that sorts strawberries and can do the work of 800 people; Aethon, a medical robotics company founded in 2002, automates much of hospitals’ tangled internal logistics chains. “We create jobs, we don’t take them away,” growls Whittaker, whose own firm, RedZone Robotics, which he founded while keeping his university research post, builds robots that inspect small sewer lines. “If you want to dig through shit for a living that’s your business. But a robot can get into a tiny pipe, and a person can’t do that, so I’m not taking anyone’s job away.”

This story of Pittsburgh’s reinvention, then, is very much about not only the new politics of urban renewal—but also about the future shape of an American economy that may well be smarter, faster and more innovative, but without the sheer number of good, stable middle-class jobs that powered the great postwar American boom.

Of course, it’s still not clear whether the widespread automation of repetitive tasks—the kinds of things a machine can do as well or better than a human—is responsible for the anemic pace of American job creation since 2000. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, productivity and overall employment have generally risen together, with advances in technology spurring a virtuous cycle of re-investment and job creation. In the last decade or so, they have diverged—leading some economists to conclude that robots and smart software are elbowing humans out of the workforce. Two MIT researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, theorize that rapid technological advances have created a “great decoupling” of productivity and employment, which partially explains the malaise. Other researchers fiercely question that conclusion, and argue that the employment stall has as much to do with globalization and the accelerating boom-bust cycle of recent financial crises. “No one knows the cause” of the recent jobs slowdown,” economist David Autor told MIT’s Technology Review. “[It’s] a big puzzle… but there’s not a lot of evidence it’s linked to computers.”

Recent Dish on robots here.