William Shi runs a company called Agibot, one of the Chinese firms racing to put humanoid robots on factory floors. Asked recently about the jobs his machines are built to take, he gave a clean answer. “For some job descriptions, they want to be replaced, because it’s very boring, very dangerous, and very high-risk. Nobody wants to do this kind of job,” he told TechRadar. Well of course no one wants to do hard dangerous work if they don’t have to. The reason the vast majority of people work is to survive, in the richest nations it is perhaps to provide more comfort. While his statement is understandable at the micro level, if you zoom out and realize they want to take both the laborious jobs and the white collar jobs, that leaves a vast majority of people with nothing.
Let’s cut through the bull and corporate speak. A man who has never stood at the station on the assembly line is telling you the person who stands there would rather not. Maybe some of them would. Plenty of hard jobs are hard for no good reason, and plenty of workers would trade the danger in a heartbeat if the paycheck came along for the ride. But that is not the trade on the table. Shi isn’t offering to take the danger and leave the wage. He wants the whole job, wage included, and he has decided in advance that the person on the other end will be relieved. He never had to ask, because in his story the job did the wanting, completely removing the humanity out of the situation.
It is important to take notice of who speaks this way and what motivates these people. UBTech chief Jian Zhou stood at his own company’s launch event and told the crowd that humanoid robots will gradually take over most physical and repetitive work within twenty years. Two CEOs of two different companies are making the same disconnected emotionless forecast like it was the weather. This is the same message that is being shared in dozens of boardrooms around the world of companies building our computer based replacements. These CEOs making the predictions are the ones selling the product which is pretty telling, they profit and never have to look the workers they are leaving unemployed in the face. Their audience was never the welder or the picker or the line worker. It’s the buyer (multinational corporations) holding a budget, and “the job wanted this” sounds a lot better on stage than “we are going to replace every one of you.”
The workers are the ones who are going to be left holding the bag. To the welder on second shift who reads a seam by its color and taught three younger hands to do the same. To the warehouse picker who knows which aisle floods when it rains and moves the good stock before it does. To the line worker at a plant like General Motors’ Factory Zero in Detroit, where UAW members watched cobots take up union work while more than a thousand of them sat on layoff. Not one of them was asked whether they wanted their job to be replaced. The question got answered on their behalf by men who have never met them.
We are not here to keep dangerous work dangerous. The welder should have the fume extractor and the brace that saves her back. The picker should have the lift that spares his knees. Take the risk off the job and every one of them will thank you for it. What we refuse is the swap that pockets the wage along with the danger and calls it a mercy. The future gets built by hands, which means the hands doing the work get a say in how it changes. Ask the person at the station. They have been solving that job’s real problems for years, and they can tell you in five minutes which parts a machine should take and which parts hold the whole thing together. RJ Scaringe of Rivian is one of the few executives who says as much out loud: the simple tasks go to robots, the ones needing judgment stay with people. Good. Hold him to it, and remember he sits one board meeting away from a cheaper answer.
A job can’t want anything. Only a person can, and nobody with a budget bothered to ask.
— Stay Human ★
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