The Automated Life

The automated industry implies a new efficiency in production.  Pioneered by Henry Ford (1863-1947) with the mobile assembly line, this automated industry reduced the cost of automobiles (the Model T), from $825 to $575, a reduction of more than 30%.   Anyone who reduces by 30% the cost of anything has made a footprint in the industry.  Nowadays, mobile assembly lines are common in every industry.  Automated assembly lines are good.  There was a price to be paid, of course.  In the original automated factory, universal craftsmen were replaced by workers assigned to specific tasks.  A management team was in place for procurement of materials, training, marketing, and the like.  Workers on individual tasks were interchangeable.  Hence, one level of skill was reduced.  Fast forwarding to modern industries, the moving assembly line persists, though the workers have been replaced by robots, with the workers now tending the robots.  The management teams remain in place.  Hence, one further reduction of skills and clearly numbers obtains.  The managers of control should be called the “caretakers” of the system. 

 

This is the modern automated industry, and it has made goods we could never afford otherwise.  We enjoy them. 

From Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), the great American philosopher, we learn ”When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.”  In Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973.

Many examples of automated lives are available, across the spectrum of life.  An ant colony provides an automated life for its individuals, each interchangeable, none with a unique signature on the work to be done.  Your local zoo provides an automated life for its animals.  All aspects are cared for from birth, to health, to food, to death.  The only choice the animal has is where to lie down to sleep during the day.  The canary in your kitchen, the dog in your backyard, the cat in your home, all have the same life.  They are little more than living, breathing plants.  Fully functioning and fully automated.    Maybe this is OK, regardless of the large segment believing zoos are inhumane toward animal displays for our pleasure.

Yet, even humans live such lives.  The typical prison provides an automated life for its inmates, not very much different from the zoo.   The prison must do this to keep order amongst unruly persons.  Choices include perhaps books to read, to eat or not food provided, how and when to exercise – though regulated, or television to watch.  There is little else; this is not much.  

The newer social systems providing cradle to grave lives for its citizens implies extant well automated lives.  Health care, education, assigned jobs (with little chance of termination), old age retirement, and finally internment are all components.  Even social alternatives are provided.  Many countries have opted for such systems.  The USA is also seemingly headed toward this.  What are missing are risk, the pleasure and adventure in living, the ups and downs of success and failure, the chances of great success or abject failure, and the multitude of choices of true freedom.   All risks will have been converted to the remote possibility of winning the LOTTO – upon which many live.  We are voting ourselves into living in a zoo – a humane zoo, but a zoo nonetheless.   One can't pick and choose to select a zoo-like world as a safety net but reject it when doing well.  This is an all in proposition.  This is not OK.

Yet, like any automated industry, there will be the caretakers, those that live beyond the automation and make certain all the components function smoothly, cleansing errant aberrations that foul the works, removing the extraneous, and culling the nonconforming.  They will be the managers or caretakers of our automated lives. 

All of this may be reminiscent of George Orwell’s (1903-1950), 1984, but it is not!  Orwell’s system was imposed-forced.  Indeed, we are walking into, some running into, and voting all of this into existence.  Governments not yet converted are encouraging it with all their might.  They have made security the foremost of all human desires.  They have denigrated personal responsibility and achievement as equal to class warfare.  They have assured us of greater prosperity that ever before.  Just comply, just conform.  Embrace the justice of equality.   

Make no doubt, the advocates of automated lives simply do not imagine themselves as individual components of this grand design.  They envision themselves as the caretakers.   One could certainly term the new automated life as primitive – with gadgets. 

Yet, such a system, foundationally weak to external pressures as the citizenry regard the system as the succor of security, cannot sustain itself unless all systems are the same and in union. Such systems also need a security net, as provided by stronger systems up the chain.  Stronger systems may poach, and this is a notable problem.  In this, there is possible salvation.