Robot Workers Will Only Be as Ethical as Their Masters

​Robots could soon become advanced enough to make their own decisions, and this has some experts worrying about killer military bots. That's why Clearpath Robotics, a Canadian autonomous robot maker, has committed to building a fleet of "ethical" robots meant for the factory floor instead of the battlefield.

But labour advocates questioned how ethical an "ethical" robot really is if it threatens to replace workers who would otherwise do the same jobs.

Clearpath has, until now, focused its efforts on making autonomous land and air vehicles mainly for researchers and the military. The company joined the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots last year and promised never to build a robot that can shoot to kill. Now, with a round of new funding from venture capital firm RRE—the same company that funded Buzzfeed and cute robot sensation Jibo, to name a few past successes—Clearpath is developing a line of semi-autonomous robot trucks that can cart heavy materials from automation hub to automation hub inside a factory.

According to Clearpath CEO Matt Rendall, robots like the ones his company produces will help manufacturers to displace workers engaged in "low value" labour and create more high-level technician jobs.

"Manufacturers spend millions of dollars on these automation cells and yet the method they transport goods with is to load them up on a cart and Bob or Sally transports it," said Rendall. "That not a very good use of the capabilities they have for that environment. The idea behind automating the very low value work, is that it frees up time for humans to focus on more complex, more challenging, more valuable work."

The basic idea is, according to a Clearpath statement sent to Motherboard, to let the robots do the "dirty, dull, and deadly industrial work" that humans "shouldn't" do. Instead of replacing jobs, Rendall said, the company wants to "displace and reposition labour" to different areas of expertise—technicians, for example, who would service the robots whose jobs they replaced.

The plan sounds potentially beneficial, but labour advocates believe that Clearpath is merely trying to promote its products with the language of safety and emancipation from humdrum labour.​

"It's ridiculous—I'm not saying it's inherently false, but it's a bit of a stretch," said Andrea Peart, the health, safety, and environment spokesperson for the Canadian Labour Congress. "To say that carrying around materials in a plant is 'dirty' doesn't sound like they have a terrible amount of experience in plants. It sounds like they're trying to sell robotics equipment."

Jamie Hanes, a representative of Canadian labour union UNIFOR, said that in most cases, repositioning labour doesn't mean that everyone gets to keep their jobs. "Ultimately when you redeploy people from one job to another, there's a cascading effect that does eliminate jobs unless they're bringing in more work that wasn't done in the facility before," said Hanes. "They're not retraining people to do other tasks."

Whether the companies who buy Clearpath's robots will use them to create jobs or cut them, along with their associated costs, is ultimately up to the companies themselves, Rendall noted. Despite the company's best intentions, if a cold-hearted company decides to use automation as a tool to create value for themselves rather than for their workers or society as a whole, there's not much Clearpath can do about it.

And here's the key problem: while automation and robotics writ large certainly have the potential to save workers from lives of toil and misery—if they are indeed miserable—they also hold the possibility to deepen current inequalities, depending on whose hands they're in.

Even Karl Marx himself appears to have believed that automation would free up human minds for higher purposes, but things haven't really worked out that way so far. In China, for example, human labour is still exploited to a terrifying degree, and in the midst of a steadily rising tide of worker unrest, increasing amounts of factory automation is being used like a stick by industry leaders. No carrot.

Rendall told me that Clearpath intends to stay in North America for now, to keep close tabs on their product during its initial launch. They also hope to encourage companies to move production from overseas back to North America. But the company's vision for its industrial robots is no doubt a global one. Will they eventually go to China?

"It would be really great to have a more global position in the market," said Rendall. "It's already happening in China on a scale that would astound you. I haven't visited any of the factories in China, but if you look at some of the reports over the last couple years about the automation plans of Foxconn in response to the demand for Apple, they're looking at putting in place millions of automation cells. That's staggering."

Even though Clearpath's robots will be able to make some decisions on their own—like where to bring a load of car parts—whether or not they will result in benefits for workers will be up to the humans deciding how they'll be used.
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​Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Clearpath Robotics CEO Matt Rendall's name incorrectly in one instance, and referred to Clearpath as "ClearPath." These errors have been corrected.