Robots and Climate Change

There is something about adapting to a bad situation that makes a lot of sense.

This occurred to me when I ran across this article about robots coming to steal everyone’s job. It tells how a couple of economists are worried about the ability to adapt to the relentless march of automation. Their point is: “Too much time discussing whether robots can take your job; not enough time discussing what happens next.

A popular solution has been to “try to stall or reverse the trend of automation,” a kind of resistance movement to make it more difficult. Such measures include extra taxes on robot-produced goods or taxes on the robots themselves, which I wrote about in March of last year. Some propose new government regulations to make automation more difficult. The economists expect this approach to fail because consumers will naturally gravitate toward “cheaper goods or services” made possible by automation. (You don’t see anyone wanting to pay more for phone service to allow telephone operators to keep their jobs.)

Another proposed strategy is to “reduce the cost of human labor, by driving down wages or cutting benefits” making hiring workers preferable to buying robots. No one could seriously endorse this.

The other class of solutions they call “coping strategies.” These include teaching workers whose jobs are threatened new skills, skills less likely to be taken away by automation. Or the government could provide a guarantee to displaced workers, like a universal basic income (UBI). Both are iffy for various reasons: what skills fall into that category, how trainable are workers in mid-career, and how can any country, especially a poor one, support a UBI plan?

There is a need for more creativity around coping strategies, but at this point most of the energy goes toward ways to slow progress, a futile strategy when automation looks inevitable.

Is there a parallel here with climate change? At present all the efforts seem to be directed toward convincing everyone that climate change is real, inevitable and driven largely by human activity. There are a lot of good arguments to back this up. The intention is to promote individual and governmental action to reduce the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – a stalling, not a coping, strategy.

People put their hopes on things like the Paris Agreement to make this happen and many despair at the thought of America bowing out. But how familiar are most Americans with the agreement? It is voluntary. Each country gets to pick its own goals known as its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC).

China, for example, commits “To achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030 and making best efforts to peak early.” Peaking in 2030 means continuing to increase between now and then. India is no better: “India’s INDC do not bind it to any sector specific mitigation obligation or action.” They commit to decrease “emissions intensity” by 33% to 35% in an  economy where the demand for electricity expected to increase by more than 3 times – in other words, they plan meet much more energy need slightly more efficiently. In another instance, Norway commits to “a target of an at least 40% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels.” They get to pick the target and the comparison and when serious development will start, but there is no penalty for missing. (See all countries here.)

Many NDC commitments, when read in detail seem timid at best. Paris doesn’t look like the real solution, just a strategy to postpone the inevitable.

Where are the people talking about dikes and levees around the major coastal cities or better drainage systems for Houston? Why is the government still subsidizing flood insurance for new construction too close to oceans, rivers and streams? So many creative possibilities, adjustments and adaptations for coping are being ignored or overlooked.

In both cases, it makes sense to think critically about how to allocate our resources, putting up roadblocks or planning ahead.