It’s not the robots, it’s the patents
The robots are coming. They will take your job. Whether you are a factory worker, sales clerk, doctor or lawyer, advanced high tech will eventually replace you. Their creators will control the economy and much of its wealth while the rest of us languish. But the problem is not the robots themselves but the patents that protect them.
Bill Gates says tax the robots. Statist policy wonks agree: Create guaranteed incomes, expand social services and raise the safety nets. Take from the robots and give to the poor. This solution would create a permanent underclass and an overbearing nanny state upon which t he hordes would perpetually depend. We would hobble forward as a society deeply divided between those who direct the technology and those who are directed by it. It is not a place one would want to live.
The technology is not the villain. Robots, intelligent computers, gene manipulation and other ingenious inventions are just tools. Like all good tools, they improve productivity and relieve us from toil. The threat is the laws that empower their creators: patents and copyright that grant monopolies ( 20 years under the Canadian Patent Act; under the Copyright Act, the life of the author plus 50 years). Our dim future is not due to technology but to the ability of its developers to restrict our liberties.
Intellectual property ( IP) is not like “ordinary” property. Ordinary property as a legal concept exists as a corollary of the proposition that people may not use force against each other. At common law, property in things is limited to the thing itself. If you buy wood and nails to build a chair, you have all the property rights in that chair. But your neighbour is at liberty to buy his own wood and nails to build his own chair, even if his chair is exactly the same as yours. There is no property in ideas, since your ideas can be used without taking them away.
A patent does what ordinary property does not: prohibit the use of an idea. Whereas ordinary property gives exclusionary rights only to a particular thing, patents give rights over every physical embodiment of an invention. If ordinary property worked that way, you could prohibit anyone from using the idea of your chair and restrict your neighbour’s use of his own materials.
Should Monsanto own the seeds produced by the plants growing in your own fields? Should a research company be able to prohibit a hospital from testing a patient’s genes? How can the market support 2,000-per-cent price hikes for prescription drugs? Why is Windows 10 the dominant operating system for non-Apple computers? None of these outcomes would have occurred without IP.
Do patents and copyright make it more or less likely that your job will be taken by a robot? It is impossible to know for sure. On one hand, patents and copyright exist to incentivize invention and creativity. They make high tech more profitable and increase investment. ( The extent to which they actually do so is disputed.) On the other hand, the monopolies created by IP regimes make tech more expensive by limiting competition, potentially slowing widespread adoption.
Being replaced by a robot may be crushing but it is not unfair. Recall the Luddites. In early 19th century England, they destroyed weaving machinery in a futile attempt to protect their jobs. Their story now symbolizes pointless resistance to technological innovation. How mistaken they were to think that they could defeat the march of progress, and how foolish to have wanted to. The vastly superior standard of living now enjoyed by their descendants is a direct result of 200 years of human invention.
We should not be protected f r om advancing technology any more than the Luddites were. The objective should be neither to impede the robots nor to compensate those who are displaced. All we can ask for is a marketplace of free and open competition, within which our task is to adapt.
Therein lies the difficulty. IP regimes do not represent free and open competition, but a protectionist form of corporate welfare. Like the mad inventor who builds the creature that turns on him, our laws have created categories of property rights that now threaten to strangle competition and leave us destitute.
The time has come to reconsider patents and copyright. The robots can be our friends and assets. Their IP masters, not so much.
THE THREAT IS THE LAWS THAT EMPOWER THEIR CREATORS.