DANGER WILL ROBINSON! The Real Cost of Automation

"Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?"                       --Robert F. Kennedy

Thank you Stop and Shop for letting me scan and bag my own groceries. 

I admit I’d rather have stood in the line of a real, live human cashier at your store the other day. Rather have practiced my time honored ritual of waiting for the person in front of me to finish, giving me the time to indulge my secret grocery store treat: reading the National Enquirer. It’s not that I found the act of scanning and bagging and paying and listening to the lifeless voice of your self-checkout machine onerous.

It was actually pretty easy and yet: I have a question.

Who lost their job or who won’t get a job, because of this machine? Who wasn’t able to secure a good union job as a cashier, with health care, and dental care, and a 401K and life insurance too? I get that being the only unionized grocery store in New England makes it very hard for you to make a profit and compete against non-union supermarkets. Profit margins are slim. I applaud the fact you try and pay your workers a living wage. 

But still: it felt weird for me to go through that do it yourself check-out line and then look around and realize that the number of human staffed lines has greatly diminished as of late. Not just there but at all of my local grocery stores and department stores too. Makes me wonder if one day I’ll walk into the local Shaw’s or Roche Brothers and there will be no sentient being to greet me or to steer me to the spice section for my latest recipe or to roll the cart out to the car for my senior Mom or to smile and make sure my groceries are double bagged just so.

Here’s the thing about automation, about the systematic replacement of human beings with machines in the workplace or any other disruptive idea or system that comes along and causes people, real people to lose their jobs, lose their businesses, lose their livelihoods.  No one seems to ever talk about that human toll and cost. All we seem to care about is return on investment for the stockholders and maximizing productivity and making things and services cost as little as possible for the consumer. 

It’s not just happening where we buy our food. It’s happening in the factory too and in the warehouse and on the farm. Anywhere, really, where ever costs can be cut so consumers like me can go cheap, cheap, cheap and companies can go profits, profits, profits. 

In a recent article by CNBC reporter Chloe Taylor, she cites a statistic from a 2019 Oxford Economics analysis that is breathtaking. In the next ten years, 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide will be lost to automation. 20,000,000.

What will happen to all those line workers and assemblers and packers and machine operators?  How will they support their families and pay for housing and survive? Can’t we at least ask such questions, as we think about the behemoth that is our national and world economy? Ever wonder why angry political populist movements are sweeping around the globe, like Brexit in Great Britain, like the rise of thousands of frustrated ex-factory workers in places like Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania, our fellow citizens, who just want someone, anyone to pay attention to their plight, to talk about the real costs of globalization and hyper productivity, all this human wreckage mostly ignored?

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, “…all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...”

Faith, morality and ethics always teach that we are all interconnected, interdependent, woven into one fabric, one world, one destiny. If I demand the cheapest prices possible for my food or the fastest delivery possible for my goods and services; when I demand a better return on my stocks and 401K, I am participating in a larger system and my choices have an impact on others. When I demand that things be more efficient and less expensive and when that causes millions of people to lose work: I need to own that.

I think we all do. 

There are no easy answers to this question, these tensions—between productivity and people, good jobs and good profits, paying more or paying less. But in the least, let us as a society ask this one question: when the robots come, when the machines replace people, what happens to the ones who no longer stand in the check-out line and serve us?

Who will care about them?

    

             

  

Whatever It Is, I'm Against It!!

“I don't know what they have to say, It makes no difference anyway, Whatever it is, I'm against it, No matter what it is or who commenced it, I'm against it!”        --Groucho Marx, 1932

At least it’s predictable, as dependable as the cold in our New England winter and a late sunrise at January dawn and the truth that if you order a regular coffee at Dunkin Donuts it will contain one cream and two sugars.

Hold almost any vote in the Congress these days and all the Democrats will vote one way and all the Republicans will vote the other way. Yes, very, very rarely one or two brave souls might  cross the line and vote against his or her party but, the rest of the time?  The folks we have elected are forever united in their opposition to the other party.

If they are for it, I’m against it!

Both sides are guilty of hyper-partisanship. Examples: the Affordable Care Act passed the Congress in 2010 will 100 percent Democrat support and zero percent Republican support. The effort to partially repeal the ACA in the Senate in 2017 resulted in every Democrat voting no, every Republican “yes”. Impeachment? Voting for the first article were 230 Democrats and one Independent, and against, 197 Republicans, joined by two Democrats. On article two: 228 for, 198 against, again, right down the partisan line. Oh: one rep did vote “present”. Good to know she knew where she was.

The long list of these straight up or down party votes has gotten much longer and continues to be the norm in Washington. Even before a vote is taken, even if healthy debate happens, even though in past times some folks would have voted their conscience and against partisanship--in 2020? Not a chance. 

In the Congress and America—we are more sharply divided by party, partisanship, ideology, and politics than we have ever been, at least for more than a generation, and at the state level too. Only Minnesota has a split legislature—every other state is either all Republican majority or all Democratic majority, a first, not seen for 106 years.

“Your proposition may be good, But let's have one thing understood: Whatever it is, I'm against it. And even when you've changed it or condensed it, I'm against it.”

So, really, seriously…is one party absolutely right and the other party absolutely wrong, all the time? Does one party have all the good answers and one party have all the bad answers? Will the Dems absolutely save us and GOP’ers certainly doom us? Should the Donkey party be forever kicked out and the Elephant trumpeted as best for our nation?

We as citizens should be mighty worried about this take no prisoners politics and how it damages us as a people, as a nation, a country.  When will we demand that our elected officials, no matter what their ideology--do what is right—not for party, but for country? Work, not just for election or perpetual re-election but for the common good? To not just march in lock step with like minded members of your chummy little politics club, but instead to vote with courage and conscience, and even standing with your opponent?

“For months before my son was born, I used to yell from night till morn, ‘Whatever it is, I'm against it.’ And I've been yelling since I first commenced it, I'm against it.”

Here’s where I’m supposed to assign blame for our gridlocked government. It’s the Democrats’ fault! It’s the Republicans! My bi-partisan opinion is this: a pox on both houses. It is our fault too, as citizens and voters. As long as we close our ears and hearts to listening to a neighbor who voted differently than us, nothing will change. As long as we nominate and elect candidates at the extreme edges of the ideological spectrum and dismiss candidates and voters who live in the middle, politically, like me, like most Americans, wars will only intensify. As long as our two parties and voters punish politicians who dare to work across the aisle, nothing will change.

Building diversity with unity is very hard work. I’ve pastored for more than thirty years and tried to create community out of very disparate folks: liberals and conservatives, convicted believers and unsure seekers, but it can be realized. With humility. With respect. With care.

Anybody can say and vote: “I’m against it!” But who will have the guts and the vision to vote and say, “I’m for it!” and then reach across the fence and the aisle and do the work of civic and civil life? 

I’d vote for that person.

                    

Thank You Tom Brady. Godspeed: It's a Gift to Watch You Play.

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.” --T.S. Eliot

It was January 4^th, 2020, a Saturday night, 11:15 pm or so in the eastern time zone when it all ended. 

When a part of what it means to be a New England sports fan, what it means to mark the passage of time and the seasons and the decades through one player: this expired. No time left on the clock.

Game over. Maybe one amazing career over too. An era perhaps concluded in our lives as citizens of this rocky and Yankee and sometimes a bit cranky part of God’s Creation.

The end of this game was not marked by triumph as we hoped for, nor in victory as we cheered for, nor even in last minute drama as we had come to expect from our local gridiron hero and his team. Nope. 

It ended with an errantly thrown pass, a tip and then a touchdown for the other team.

Thrown by one Tom Brady, New England Patriots quarterback for the past 6,671 days—if you’re counting. Eighteen years, three months and thirteen days to be exact, since Brady stepped onto the playing field as a starter, on September 30th, 2001.  Now six world championships later—the most ever by an NFL quarterback--the very real possibility exists that Brady will not return to the Patriots, to the playing fields we’ve grown so accustomed to seeing him inhabit on so, so many Sunday afternoons.

For the fans, the sadness of the very real possibility that this chapter is coming to a close: we get why it is significant to us, why it matters. Why, even though it is only a game after all, played by grown men in dress up uniforms, with nothing really momentous at stake—why it still stings. He will be missed. For the non-football fan or the casual sports fan consider this: for almost twenty years, almost a whole generation, Brady and the Pats have given us more excitement and more entertainment than we could ever have imagined, and so much more than any other part of the country. Brady and the Pats have gifted us with more reasons to find something wonderful to celebrate and to watch together, especially in the cold of winter, in the dark and the chill.

We had a good ride together. A great ride.

Brady and the Patriots always gave all of us plenty to talk about and read about and argue about and care about.  At its best, sports invite us to collectively participate in a spectacle, in a microcosm of human struggle and triumph. Sports allow us to share with one another other pride of place and the sheer joy of play. Sports is one of the last civic enterprises within which we are still able to agree most of the time, even as so much now divides us in the era of incivility.

Yes, there is the chance Tom Terrific may be back.  Even a chance, God forbid, that he shows up next season wearing a different uniform. Who knows? The sports pundits and prognosticators will write tens of thousands of words and spout endless opinions about what comes next. But for me, for now: it does feel like a last hurrah.

This past Saturday night teaches us that most endings in this life are not fairy tale, nor storybook, nor unbelievable. Granted, Ted Williams, who was perhaps the best hitter in the history of baseball, who roamed left field at Fenway Park for the Red Sox for 22 years, he did get to leave us with a bang. In his last at bat, on a rainy September afternoon in 1960, he hit a home run. 

But most often in sports, as bodies break down, as talents diminish, as dynasties crumble, the end is usually marked by that whimper. Yet that’s not what I will remember most from the hundreds of hours I’ve spent glued to the TV watching Brady, cheering for the Pats at the top of my lungs, or the special times I actually got to see them play in person, at Gillette Stadium. I will remember the fact that for so many years, he and the Pats just made life more interesting, more enjoyable, and more fun.

So, if this is it, thank you, Tom, and Godspeed. You took the athletic gifts that God gave to you and then used them all up, used them well, right up until the last whistle. And best of all, we got to watch. Game over, sure. The last score says it was a loss, but for New England and the fans?

We won.