“The Church and the Robot Uprising”

September 3, 2017

 

Genesis 3:17-19

II Thessalonians 3:6-13

 

The prophet Jeremiah asked the people: “If you have raced with foot-runners and they have wearied you, what will you do when the horses come?”

On this Labor Day weekend I’m wondering: What will we do when the robots come?

Is the church ready for the robot uprising?

Last Monday Whole Foods stores across the nation opened under new ownership—Amazon, the online retail giant. Amazon and Walmart are engaged in a battle for supremacy, each seeking to become the nation’s top retailer and each seeking to become more like the other. While Walmart works to increase its online presence, Amazon has opened brick and mortar bookstores and now sells groceries. More and more both are turning to automation to run their warehouses. They are exploring how to use drones to speed the delivery of goods to your doorstep.

Ed Hess is a professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. Earlier this year he warned about what he called “the looming technology tsunami that will hit the US job market in the next five to fifteen years and likely destroy tens of millions of jobs due to automation by artificial intelligence, 3-D manufacturing, advanced robotics and driverless vehicles…The best research to date,” Hess says,” indicates that 47% of all US jobs are likely to be replaced by technology over the next 10 to 15 years, more than 80 million jobs in all…”

47% of jobs—think of that. Still fresh in all of our minds is the 2008 recession that resulted in 10% unemployment. Now triple that. Or quintuple that.

I worry that the church—and individual congregations and individual members—are not ready for the changes coming our way. I worry that our theology, our worship, our action leave us unprepared for what is coming.

I worry: how will the church respond to the robot uprising?

I know. I sound alarmist. But as robotics and artificial intelligence rapidly develop, I find that I need to listen closely to hear a word of hope, a word of grace, for those who work and for the growing number of those whose labor is no longer needed.

In most congregations on most Sundays, worshippers rarely hear about labor or justice for workers. We’re one of the exceptions to that, but even here our focus is usually on other issues.

For a few minutes, recall the scripture lessons that we heard.

In the second account of creation in Genesis, the man and the woman make their own choices—or maybe we should say they go along with the serpent’s choice—and disobey the God who created them. In doing this they bring God’s curse not only upon themselves but also upon the land.

The result, as we heard, is that work, while not itself cursed, becomes much more difficult. In this story, written at a time when field work was done by women, God tells the woman, “I will greatly increase your toil…” The ground is cursed and thorns and thistles will make growing decent crops much harder.

We recognize, of course, that this account is not history. It is myth in the best sense of the word—a story that tells us much about the human condition: that we are fallen and rooted to the earth; that there are times when, even though we pour our best efforts into our work, we feel as though we are constantly struggling against thorns and thistles. This story also tells us that even when we are weary from toil, God is still in relationship with us, that as hard as work might be in a fallen world, our work is still done under God’s providential care. We are able to work because God still gives us strength.

We also have the early Christian understanding that work is essential to life—and even to the life of faith. Perhaps those words from II Thessalonians get to that better than any others. The Christians in Thessalonica, you will remember, were convinced that the end of the age was coming soon. In only a short while, the risen Christ would return to earth and take away the faithful.

Was it Martin Luther who said, “If I knew the end of the world would be tomorrow, I would plant a tree today”? Maybe not, but this sentiment was scarce in Thessalonica. With the end at hand, many there were inclined to take it easy. Some members of that small Christian community were being disruptive and refusing to work.

Nonsense! Paul writes. Remember when I was there with you, I was working. I worked night and day to pay for what I ate. Imitate me. Some of you are no longer supporting themselves with their work. Here’s an idea: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat! That will show those idle busybodies!

Texts such as these from Genesis and Second Thessalonians addressed work for millennia: Get to work. Sure it’s exhausting. That’s why it’s called work. Now, get back to work.

Certainly our thinking about work has evolved. Over time people would realize that it was wrong—evil—to enslave people for their work. It was wrong to send children to the mills and into the mines. It was wrong to deny workers a living wage. It was right to honor the work—paid and unpaid—that people did.

Through all of this, scripture has sustained and challenged us—until now.

Now the horizon of a new world can be seen.

Away from the front line of these changes, the billionaires argue about the impact of artificial intelligence on our lives and our work.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a backyard cookout in July—and don’t you wonder what Zuckerberg’s “back yard” looks like and just how big it is?—Zuckerberg said: “I think that people who are naysayers and try to dream up those doomsday scenarios…I don’t understand it. It’s really negative, and in some way I think it’s pretty impossible.” He also argued that people “can build things and the world gets better.”

Another billionaire, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of the electric car company, Tesla, responded that Zuckerberg’s understanding of the threat posed by artificial intelligence “is limited.” Musk apparently has been warning for years that artificial intelligence is “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” In this effort he is joined by Stephen Hawking,  who, worried about the threat that artificial intelligence poses, has suggested a world government to monitor things and stop a robot uprising.

My guess is that neither of them is going to get an invitation to a Zuckerberg barbeque any time soon.

I am concerned about the way in which artificial intelligence and robotics are reshaping what work means and how wealth is created. I am concerned about the concurrent economic inequality that is being created.

Kai-Fu Lee is the president of the Artificial Intelligence Institute and has thought about much of this. He says that “Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the artificial intelligence revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers). Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.”

This will result in great profits for many companies. Imagine how much money you could make from a fleet of self-driving trucks carrying good cross-country with no pesky human driver to pay. But such profits will mean “enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands and enormous numbers of people out of work.”

Lee thinks that the solution to the problem of mass unemployment might entail preparing people for jobs involving creativity, planning, and what he calls “cross domain thinking”—he mentions trial lawyers, social workers, and bartenders as examples. I like to think that ministers might be in this category of the still-employable. But when Lee asks, “How many bartenders does a society really need?” I realize one could easily substitute “ministers” into that sentence.

There are those who, along with Lee, think that some form of universal basic income would be required for the many who will be displaced. Some of the vast wealth of the few would need to be given to the vast numbers of the unemployed. Such an economic transfer on a global scale would be staggeringly difficult. But Lee suggests this might be the only way to deal with what he calls the “looming artificial intelligence-fueled gap between the haves and the have nots.”

In an old Beyond the Fringe skit the British comedian, Peter Cook talks about a book he is reading that envisions a disastrous end for the earth. “But,” Cook says, the author “ends the book on a note of hope. He says, ‘I hope this will not happen.’”

So, too, do I. But these are the challenges of work and faith in the coming years

What will be the Christian response in the decades ahead?

We cannot say: “Do not associate with the idle—get back to work,” when there are no jobs to go back to.

We will not find significant meaning in stories of thistles and thorns when any work at all will seem to be a blessing.

What will it mean to speak of work as a “vocation,” as a calling from God, when it seems that God is silent?

Will our food pantries and shelters be able to address the social upheaval when unemployment rises to 50% or higher?

I would like to have the answers, but this morning I mostly have questions. And that’s OK because we’re a congregation that respects questions.

I raise these issues about work as Labor Day approaches because I don’t know of any other ministers or churches or seminaries or denominational offices that are asking them. If these questions become more pressing in the years ahead, this congregation will be a good place to seek their answers.

If there is a way forward, it might be to return to that early affirmation in Genesis that human beings are created “in the image of God.” That phrase suggests all sorts of possibilities, among them that we ourselves have the ability to create, to bring something new into existence.

Additionally we have the good news that in Christ God brings hope out of despair and life out of death.

While not an answer, the way forward will not be found in seeking to crush the robots.

With human creativity that that values human flourishing, we can deal with the robot uprising. Our work—and the work of others—are ways of bringing about human flourishing. Seeing work in this way will itself be a revolution, introducing new possibilities into the workplace and the world.