What The Magnificent Ambersons Can (Also) Teach Us About Technological Change

There is little doubt at this point that the media has quite oversold the progress of automation in our era. (Exemplary is the misrepresentation of the Frey-Osborne study on automation, to the degree that it caused a panic at the time and commentators, still repeating what it did not actually say as if it did, now sneer at the study as having got it wrong on those grounds.)

Yet there is the other end of the discourse, with its sneering dismissal of automation. This takes different forms--for instance, the blithe dismissal of the very idea of technological unemployment as if it were some logical impossibility by economists who "function like the caricature of the physicist whose every inquiry begins with 'imagine a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless plane'" (with the fact that this enables them to not worry about unemployment, and the remedies for it they find so deeply distasteful, not irrelevant to their prejudices).

However, what has interested me as of late is the way some react to the incomplete or imperfect implementation of automation in places with humans "backing up" the bots--filling in gaps, offering corrections, etc.--or simply the machine taking over parts of the work process as humans see to others. (For instance, one hears of the fast-food chains operating experimental outlets where the customer never deals face to face with a human, but humans are "in the back," preparing the food.)

One can plausibly see these situations as a matter of experimentation and refinement on the way to, at least some of the time, producing a more thoroughly automated process. But these commentators commonly react dismissively, pointing to such as evidence of some function being inherently "unautomatable." Frankly, they often do so in a heckling manner that reminds me of the idiots in The Magnificent Ambersons who, whenever they saw a car broken down by the side of the road, oafishly taunted its driver with the yell "Git a hoss!"

Well, those cars broke down less and less often, giving them less opportunity to yell "Git a hoss!" Instead the taunters found themselves having to "Git a car!" instead. And so it may go here in many a case--with the taunting helping no one at all.