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.I stood in a large, airy room that looked like a health spa for robots.Mechanical arms were swinging, flexing, grasping, bending.More than a dozen robots were exercising in the robot lab of the General Motors Research Laboratories, in Warren, Michigan, a few miles outside Detroit.Some of the robots have been doing their calisthenics for more than two years.“We’re testing their durability,” says Dr.Robert A.Frosch, director of the Research Laboratories.A former head of NASA, Frosch seems quite at home with the robots.And the robots keep on working tirelessly, without anyone supervising them: swing, flex, grasp, bend.Eight hours a day.Or sixteen, if necessary.Or maybe even twenty-four.Testing their durability.I got the idea that the robots were practicing, among themselves, to take over most of the jobs in today’s workplaces.While I was watching those robots patiently, smoothly, ceaselessly repeating their assigned tasks, some 750,000 telephone workers were walking the picket lines across the nation, on strike against AT&T.Yet the telephone system worked virtually without a wobble, because it is so highly automated that it could do without those three-quarters of a million human workers, at least for a few weeks.“Telescab,” the strikers called the computerized networks that kept the phones working with a minimum of human help.In California, that same week, the Wells Fargo Bank and the Bank of America announced plans to close more than sixty branch offices throughout the state, replacing them with automated teller machines.“We’re changing the way we distribute banking services,” said a Wells Fargo executive.Nor were telephone workers and bank clerks the only people being hit by automation that week.The Wall Street Journal carried an article on how computers are transforming the practice of law.“Computers write letters, contracts, wills and briefs,” said the Journal.“Computers bill clients and keep track of evidence and court calendars.Computer systems provide pushbutton legal research, finding in minutes cases that once took hours or days to locate.Computers can check the testimony of one witness against another and help in tax, estate, and pension planning.”Computers, robots, and automated systems are very much in the job market today, competing against human workers every day—and winning.There are nearly 2500 robots at work in General Motors factories today.GM plans to bring their robotic workforce up to 14,000 by 1990.Most of these robots work at the toughest, dirtiest, noisiest jobs: assembly, machining, welding, painting.The robots are deaf, blind, and not very sensitive.But they work without complaint and they never ask for a raise.There are more than ten million unemployed people in the United States.The automobile industry laid off roughly half a million in the first two years of the 1980s.Economists agree that most of these workers will never be rehired; not at their old jobs, at least.Frosch and others at GM insist that the planned increase in robots will not cause more layoffs of human workers.But the clear fact is that the job market for people at GM will not expand, while the job market for robots will.“Robots don’t cause unemployment,” says Dr.James S.Albus, chief of the Industrial Systems Division of the National Bureau of Standards, just outside Washington, D.C.“At least,” he amends, “robots don’t cause unemployment in the countries that build the robots.Robots built in Japan have caused unemployment in the United States, but employment has risen in Japan because of robotics.”Albus’ point is that robots allow a manufacturer to produce goods of higher quality and lower cost than human workers.Therefore robots increase productivity, make the company more profitable, and lead to the creation of more markets, more jobs, more opportunities for human workers.But in the nation that imports robot-produced goods, domestic markets shrink, overseas markets disappear, and jobs grow scarcer.Is the United States becoming an underdeveloped nation, robotically speaking? Will America enter the twenty-first century as a second-rate power, exporting grain and importing high technology goods built by foreign robots? Or must American industry replace most of its human workforce with robots, to stay abreast of foreign competition, and thereby cause massive unemployment?In the whole world, there are fewer than 34,000 robots working in industry today.Japan leads the world with some 20,000 robots.The United States has about 6000 on the job, and Western Europe has roughly 8000.These numbers are growing by about thirty-five percent per year, which means that there could be 100,000 robots in the U.S.by 1990, and a million robots on the job in America by the year 2000.That would represent about two percent of the total labor force.By the year 2020, though, if the rate of increase keeps steady, there will be as many robots in the workforce as people.Many decades ago, science fiction writers depicted a future world in which robots did most of the work in society, freeing human beings from the drudgery of labor.That kind of world is slowly becoming reality.But the question that the writers never faced is the problem that confronts us today: When a robot takes over my job, how do I earn an income?The simplest answer is to prevent robots from entering the workforce.In Britain, until very recently, the powerful labor unions resisted automation of any kind on the grounds that it took away jobs from human workers
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