Robots, Drones, and Law Enforcement

Rolling into Poolesville this morning, I began my deceleration as I rounded the bend on Route One Oh Seven.  I was coming up on the local Catholic church, but my reduction in speed had less to do with that than the two speed cameras that flank the primary entryway into the sleepy little burg.

"Our Lady of the Speed Trap," was what one wit had called it, and so I make a point of keeping 'er at the mandated Thirty Em Pii Aytch as I roll by the sanctuary of my Catholic brothers and sisters.

Only today, one of the two Gatso cameras was clearly down.  A patch of black plastic was taped crudely over the front of the one pointing out of town, flapping in the wind like a large wounded bat.  As I passed, the source of the damage became clear.  A scattered pattern of indentations lay across the front of the unit, which to my untrained eye indicated that the source of the malfunction was probably not software, unless 12 gauge "double aught" buckshot counts as software.

Guess some local didn't take too kindly to that recent ticket in the mail.  Another reminder that Poolesville really really isn't Bethesda, I guess.

As effective as it can be, there's just something odd about automated law enforcement.   Surveillance cameras just seem so very dystopian.  Here in Montgomery County, there's plenty of it, as over the last decade speed cameras have sprung up like grey steel mushrooms.

Across the Potomac river in my home state of Virginny, things have been rather less intrusive, as the conservative distrust of government has so far trumped the conservative tendency to love all things law-enforcement.

Only now, that may change.  It looks like we Virginians are going to skip right over the cameras, and go straight to Predator drones.  Gov. McDonnell and some leading law enforcement officials think it'll be the bees knees.  It's just another tool in the toolbox of law enforcement, or so the spiel goes.  It'll be cost-effective and productive, says the Governor...although it's not quite clear what that means.  Cost effective would mean fewer human beings working as police officers, I suppose.  Productive would mean "more tickets, fines, and penalties," I'd guess, which would make up for all those taxes Grover Norquist won't let us pay to support the livelihoods of well-trained community law-enforcement professionals.

Which would bring us into that place where we'd be interacting less and less with law enforcement professionals, and more and more with automated systems and farmed-out-to-lowest-bid-contractor bureaucracies.  Not to mention living in a country where robot drones circle the skies, constantly watching for our infractions with their unblinking eyes.

Creating Jobs for Commie Robots

Yesterday, in perusing the business news, one little tidbit stuck out for me as I sought relief from the endless coverage of the debt-ceiling hoo-hah.

That tidbit had to do with the manufacture of the Apple products that seem to pervade my home.  The iPods and iPhones and MacBooks and even the iMac upon which this is currently being typed are all designed by folks on the West Coast, but are assembled by FoxConn in China.

That's where all the jobs created by our vaunted  "job creators" go these days.  Well, there or Mexico, or Vietnam, or Burma.  

But yesterday, Foxconn announced that it is going to be letting go hundreds of thousands of workers over the next three years.  It appears that with the growth of their economy, the Chinese who have so diligently performed for next to nothing on the assembly lines are now starting to expect better pay and some protections in the workplace.  Even though they're making a small fraction of what American workers used to make, it's still too much.  It's biting into profit margins.

So in the name of efficiency and improving profitability, Foxconn has announced that it will replace those line workers with around 300,000 robots.  Remaining workers will be "higher up the value chain."   Profits will be retained.  Your iPhone 5 will be a marvelous, magical wonderment, assembled with the help of our Chinese robot friends.

Here's what I just don't get about this.  Within the context of our global economy, we appear to have reached the point where even the most marginally compensated human labor is an impediment to profitability.  Providing wages to line workers is, even in the context of the Chinese economy, now a greater drain on capital than the purchase, energy, and maintenance costs for robotic production.   When you add in the outrageous demands that Chinese workers make...for four hours of fitful sleep a night, a few morsels of kung pao rodent, and a chance to urinate more than once a day without their pay being docked...it's clear that where Foxconn goes, so ultimately goes most production.

But here, the pursuit of profit ultimately is a spiral into economic oblivion.  If workers are no longer necessary in factories, and robot harvesters and combines are the future of profitable agriculture, the question becomes...how does capitalism survive its own governing ethos?  If there are no workers to buy the products that are produced by the robots, then the pursuit of profit margins will have poisoned the economic ecology.  You'll have lots of product, cheaply made, but no global base of salaried workers to consume that product.

Capitalism becomes the serpent consuming its own tail, a system doomed to fail as it devours itself.

Such odd creatures, we humans are.