SANTA ROSA, CA—Last fall’s presidential election was all about the economy, specifically how to create good-paying jobs.
But the candidates ignored the elephant in the room—the increasingly sophisticated robots now replacing workers in industry after industry.
In the heat of the campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney said he could create millions of new jobs by cutting taxes on corporations and the rich. Democrat President Barrack Obama promised to create millions of jobs through spending on infrastructure—roads, bridges, schools, and the like.
But neither candidate addressed the looming loss of millions of jobs, as corporations replace human beings on the job floor with fast, mobile, second-generation robots.
That would have required them to explain that new, computerized automation means corporations increasingly have no need for workers.
They would have had to explain that this world-changing shift underlies the economic crisis as a whole.
And they would have had to explain that the most important political question today is this: how to reorganize society so that everyone benefits from the new mode of production—and no one is left out in the cold.
Sophisticated robots have been replacing thousands of workers in production jobs for some time now. But only recently has this earthshaking change been given serious attention in the press.
The shift is too big and too obvious to keep hidden any more—not when the Chinese company that assembles iPhones with the world’s lowest paid workers announces it is buying a million robots to replace them.
The new, second-generation robots can multi-task with pin-point accuracy, and they are so fast they must be shielded for the safety of their human attendants.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” an engineer at the Phillips electric-shaver plant in the Netherlands told the New York Times.
The Times compares production workers’ replacement by robots today to the 20th-century mechanization of agriculture—which drove 95 percent of agricultural workers off the land and into the factories.
Today, there is a big disconnect between opening new factories and creating jobs.
“Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing Back to California,” proclaims a banner at a new solar-panel factory in Milpitas, just outside of San Jose.
But “in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers,” the Times reports.
In nearby Fremont, pathbreaking Tesla Motors has reopened the old GM plant, where legions of workers once assembled half a million cars a year.
But Tesla’s assembly is done by squads of robots performing as many as four jobs—welding, riveting, bonding, and installing.
With robots replacing workers, creating jobs is not the problem. Creating a new way to share the bounty is the problem. Tied to the 1%, the Democrats and Republicans can’t address that problem.
But any party of, by, and for the 99% will put it front and center.
