Will RFID Help to Enslave Us?

There has been a growing chorus of experts claiming that advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics will make human workers obsolete. The argument goes something like this: Computing power has gotten incredibly inexpensive. At the same time, we are seeing advancements in robotics, machine learning and machine vision that could enable robots to do almost any job humans do today.

In February, I wrote about a December 2013 article in Wired magazine titled "Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—And Must—Take Our Jobs." In that article, author Kevin Kelly argued that we will soon see a wave of robots taking over most jobs that people are doing today. "Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines," he wrote. "Robot replacement is just a matter of time" (see The Age of Robots).

Because RFID enables computers to interact with the real world in a way that has been too expensive or impossible in the past, I have been thinking about its effect on workers for years. RFID technologies will enable robots to differentiate things that look very similar but which are, in fact, different. For example, the technology would make it possible for a robot to help a customer by very quickly picking out the correct pair of jeans from a pile of items that look virtually identical.

RFID has already had some impact on the workforce. I don't have any statistics, but I am pretty certain fewer people work as toll collectors today than a decade ago, since many transportation agencies worldwide adopted automated toll-collection systems that use RFID technology.

But I have never believed RFID and other technologies spell the end for workers. After all, companies have invested trillions of dollars in IT during the past 50 years, and we employ far more workers than ever before (even if the unemployment rate globally remains way too high). Steve Ratner, a former counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury and the man who led the Obama Administration's successful effort to restructure the automobile industry after the financial collapse of 2008, apparently agrees with me.