Sobering Automation

I found James’ last column (“South Pacific Avenue: A Metaphor for Post-Industrial America,” in the “At Length” section of the Aug. 4-17, 2022,) both informative and sobering. Automation has been around a while. Almost a century ago hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, worked as manual phone operators. When automation came, proponents assured us that the new technology would create more jobs than the ones that were lost. More recently auto workers have lost a lot of jobs to robotics as well as seeing plants move overseas.In the mid1990s automation hit radio. Disc jockeys were replaced with tapes that made “one-hit wonders” out of Roy Orbison (Pretty Woman), Van Morrison (Brown-eyed Girl) and—gasp—the Rolling Stones (Satisfaction). Major league baseball has hinted that it would not mind replacing umpires by expanding the technology it already has in place to call balls and strikes.And just a few years ago there was a lot of talk about driverless vehicles. This hasn’t received much media coverage lately but you bet the ranch, this isn’t going away. Automation should be part of the political debate, especially if the technology was developed on taxpayers’ dime, The sooner the better. In fact, somebody should talk about it at the Labor Day Picnic in a few weeks.

Steve Varalyay Torrance