Would blue-collar jobs still be done by people in a scifi setting?

Question

I'm working on a space-opera type setting for a story I'm writing, and while doing so I've been thinking about a question that has been bothering me for some time now.

The protagonist of my story is a girl whose father died in an asteroid mining accident years ago. But since my setting takes place in a world with FTL travel, AI, a lot of standard scifi technological advancements, then it begs the questions why blue-collar jobs that require hard manual labour like construction, mining, cleaning etc would still be done by people instead of machines?

Settings like Star wars gloss over this but I have a tendency to overthink issues and I want an answer to my question.

Answer 1

We need a better definition of "Blue-collar jobs"

Jobs in construction, mining, cleaning are not as physically demanding today as they were in the past, and, with few exceptions, they can no longer be called "hard manual labour".

However

• this labor is still mostly manual;
• it requires people to work in harsh environments and subjects them to various hazards;
• it (usually) does not require college degree or long training;

We can increase automation and increase productivity in many areas occupied today by blue-collar workers, but eliminating them entirely is not something that we have on horizon, not unless we are talking about highly futuristic settings. As of now (and in foreseeable future) humans are the best to pick up any new job or function, whether it's manual or non-manual. Later, automation can decrease job openings in this profession or eliminate it altogether - but that will come later.

In a "realistic" Sci-Fi settings, some blue-collar jobs that we know will be non-existent - but then some new ones would come up. So none of the professions that you mentioned may exist in the future, but "blue collar jobs" in general should stay with us for quite some time.

Answer 2

I don't follow why "died in an asteroid mining accident" equates to his having a blue-collar job or manual job. Why wouldn't her father have degrees in engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, astrophysics, electronics, and several other future specialties (cyberpsychometrics) - earned over the first 50 years of his much-extended lifespan, which is why he was entrusted by his employer to design, deploy and single-handedly operate a multi-billion dollar (in current $'s) fusion-powered robotically staffed extraction, refining, and mass-driver launching system as it digested a 2-km diameter metal-rich asteroid. Too bad he liked to go out and watch the big lasers dicing up those kiloton 'bricks', and caught a micrometeoroid that snuck past the defensive lasers but was big enough to kill a man in a short-exposure space suit, when it hit at just the right - or rather wrong - angle. OTOH, in his era, that probably was considered a blue-collar job.

Answer 3

Until you get to true Sapient Synthetic People levels of AI (a hard feat in and of itself), all decision making by an AI boils down to 'if [this criteria] then [that response] otherwise, if [some other criteria]...' Now, this is fine for the majority of cases where values are within expected parameters, but eventually the cost-benefit of coding for less and less likely events is better served by defaulting to "go ask your human overseer". This thus requires a knowledgeable human to be on site to handle these edge cases, which puts them at risk.

Similarly, if a robot is damaged, there's only so much an automated system can do to repair it, before they have to default to a human mechanic. And what if the analysis AI itself is damaged? Who watches the watcher in this case? Again, a human is required.

Thus, your unfortunate father could have easily been working with mining robots on this asteroid, and one malfunctioned, causing his death.

Answer 4

1. It saves money For what ever reason to pay someone to do theses job is cheaper then to build and maintain expensive and fance thinking machines.

2. It is illegal. Laws prevent or limit the use of thinking machines.

3. It social taboo It maybe legal but socity looks down on companies that replace human jobs with machines. Saw humans are employed for public relations reasons.

Answer 5

Most of the hard work in mining is already done by by machines today, and when we extrapolate the trend to space, then we can safely assume that mines in the far future will require even less people.

But that does not mean that a mining operation can be 100% automatized. What if a robot somewhere in the mine suddenly stops working? Then a human has to find out what's wrong. Which might require to get into the mine, find the malfunctioning robot, diagnose the problem and decide how to fix it.

This might be rather dangerous indeed. For example if that robot suddenly starts working again with the technicians hand in it. Or if the cave-in which took out the robot destabilized the mine shaft and causes another collapse. Or if the robot unearthed some weird ancient alien stuff which should have better been left undisturbed.

Answer 6

Money.

It can be as simple as that, if you like. The Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, for example, deal with a society that has moved on from money; since they have mastered energy production they can fabricate anything they want and there are no shortages and nothing is ever unavailable. Money has no place in a society like that as almost everything is free, therefore there's no such thing as an "expensive" mining robot - you can have as many (and as sophisticated) as you need. People in that society only work if they really want to - if they have a special interest, say.

If your society hasn't gone quite that far, manufactured things will still have a cash value and people will still need to earn money to buy them - you can easily parlay that into it being much cheaper to have humans mining asteroids with support from a few, very expensive and hard-to-replace, semi-independent machines. If you look at the stratification of society today, here and now, it shouldn't be too hard to just push that forward in time and see that there will always be blue-collar jobs while money is a thing and the profit motive drives business. Just assume a good mining bot costs 1,000,000 whatevers and a human miner/maintenance man costs 25,000 whatevers a year (for comparison, in the UK right now, the average annual wage is about GBP 26,000 and there are cars that cost well over GBP 1,000,000).

Basically, tomorrow is just like today, only more polarized and potentially even harder going for people in manual work. FTL travel is also extremely expensive, and the ships cost billions so if the mining budget can be shaved by having people (who, to be frank, are an ever-expanding, replaceable resource), then the question is why wouldn't the big corporations stick with cheap wetware for the hard graft and supplement their bottom line by deploying just a few expensive machines to help out?

Answer 7

It's your world. You can write whatever you want into it.

The more advanced technologies might be distributed very unevenly. Some backwater planetary system might still have far more demand for human, manual labor than the richer and more cosmopolitan worlds. The reasons for these disparities might be economic, financial, political, or even religious or rooted in racism.

When I say economic or financial, I mean that the constraints might be imposed by the environment and, ultimately physics, the technology depends on some mineral or compound or substance which is infeasible to synthesize in quantities to meet the demand (antimatter, dilithium crystals, unobtainium, phlogiston). Those are economic constraints.

Or it could be that the technology is locked up in licensing or intellectual property constraints which effectively deny the associated benefits to whole star systems (copyright EULA terms on the positronic brain AIs which effectively impossible to clone and too expensive for fringe worlds.

It's your world. You need to decide a bit more about it than you reveal to your audience. But lots of stuff can be left unknown and waved away with "it's complicated." (Then have the action and the more immediate motivations of your character move the story along without fixating on minutiae).

In fact the entire genre of space opera is characterized by epic character facing epic challenges. The environment, the stage, is stylized with trappings of science and technology. Usually, and especially for space opera, Clarke's Law applies: to wit, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Answer 8

Several answers have provided hints as to how your protagonist's dad could die in an asteroid mining accident without doing what we would consider a blue-collar job, today. But if it is also important to you that your protagonist comes from a working-class home, i.e. if the socioeconomic status is relevant, then we need a different approach and a different question:

Why is there still a working class in a sci-fi setting?

This is not the question you asked, and maybe not one you want an answer to, so I'm not going to try to give a detailed answer (but if anyone wants to do that, feel free to edit), but in short:

1. The reasons why we would have a working class in the future could be quite similar to the reasons we still have one today. With all the technological progress we have made, it would be quite feasible to work as little as six hours per week, but that's not what's happening for most of us.

2. Now, from a Marxian point of view (which is strongly associated with the idea of a working class), the deciding factor is not how much or how hard you work, but whether or not you have ownership over the means of production (factories, machines, etc.), as opposed to only owning your own labor, which you then sell to someone else for wages.

3. Putting those two aspects together, it seems there are largely political/societal reasons for the continued existence of a working class even in the face of technological progress that could have abolished classes altogether. If, in your world, those factors remain, there is no reason why sci-fi technology should get rid of working-class homes for your protagonist to grow up in.

Answer 9

Insurance.

Your protagonist's dad was an insurance compliance officer. His and his colleagues' job was to generate reports and logs corraborating the mining swarm's reporting- impartial observers tasked with ensuring that the swarm acted according to good mining practice.

Just the machine logs obviously cannot be trusted- the machines could be programmed to report "all is well" while in reality eschewing proper runoff capture to conserve fuel, in the process spewing tons and tons of micrometeorites at a nearby shipping lane etc.

So, the liability and equipment insurance providers require that all excursions include multiple human observers to try to curtail this type of liability-causing behavior.

Of course, this job is somewhat monotonous and hazardous, takes place outside the comforts of civilized society, and requires a long time commitment. So it seems to check a lot of the boxes for what we call blue-collar work, in the sense that well-paying but somewhat hazardous and dull work in a remote location, like for example oil-rig work, is decidedly blue-collar in our current time.

Answer 10

Culture could ensure it.

A future religion or philosophy with 'dignity of labour' at the centre could encourage/require people to work manual labour. (Like in A Million Open Doors by Barnes where people replaced the more efficient robot to do their eight hours of labour)

Answer 11

Yes, but it isn't recognized by the majority of society.

While the technology has long existed to automate every part of this, every several centuries the growth of the human population far outweighs the production capacity of the AI/robots and the tools that provide our wonderful human utopia. And so, while more machines can be built, it's a simple matter of economics. There are so many more people that by putting them to work in dangerous conditions, you not only have a cheaper resolution for the increased production, but in these conditions the human laborers can't reproduce, and many die. The AI figured this out a long time ago, and it is simply the most efficient method to ensure the continued, optimal growth of humanity, which is all it was programmed to do.

So when the population reaches what the AI has internally dubbed 'the tipping point' a new disease in created, and it wipes out great swaths of humanity, but no one really dies of the disease. They're taken to hospitals and the friends and family are convinced they are dead - or entire social groups 'catch the disease' and are forced into slave labor together. The greater human society would never allow for this, but are entirely ignorant. In the worst case of 'the tipping point' an entire planet's population was 'wiped out by a vicious disease' - it only spread to about a quarter of the population on most other settled planets. Naturally, the AI has determined the value of people by the method's people themselves use, so the wealthiest, most well connected - the government officials that interact with the AI - the famous and those of generational wealth are not only never targeted, but they never know.

As far as "all of humanity" is concerned, we live in a near perfect utopia, that only periodic pandemics affect in any significant way - for all technology, the AI assures us biology is still unbeatable - and anyone who might've known better died centuries ago. After all, who needs to intensively study biology living in a utopia?

Answer 12

There are a couple of possible reasons that I think easily clear the suspension of disbelief in space opera bar. For instance:

Brains Have Been Very Extensively Field Tested

Brains have been around for at least 550 million years on Earth (and maybe far longer on some other worlds in your universe). Even if your world has developed superhuman AI, it is certainly believable that research has not managed to replicate every trick that is implemented in the vertebrate brain. As a consequence, you could for instance posit that superhuman AIs in your world are, for all their greatness, still vulnerable to variants of adversarial examples. This could mean that human labour is very desirable for jobs that do not require superhuman intelligence but which do require commonsense reasoning robust against adversarially controlled input.

For instance, say your empire is strip mining some planets under its control for valuable rare minerals in order to meet its quarterly Death Star production targets. It would be very unfortunate if rebels or environmental activists managed to make your strip mining robots misclassify improvised explosive devices as chunks of valuable ore. However, if you hire a human, your operation gains an additional layer of spoofing security and your dominion over the galaxy is assured!

Note that in that kind of setting, AIs may find it useful to optimize biological brains and bodies in such ways as maximize their ability to take advantage of specific biological capabilities while minimizing creation and upkeep costs. In that sense, the degree to which your workers end up being recognizably human may vary.

History Shows That Developing AI Is Not A Good Idea

If your setting has FTL travel, the ruins of ancient civilizations that did not successfully pass some existential risk filter may serve as reminders that the future is uncertain and that it is often unwise to overstep one's station. For instance, in the spirit of Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series, it may turn out that some Elder Civilization is for some reason destroying everyone who develops general artificial intelligence. In such a setting, some civilizations (or enterprises) may continually test out the boundaries, but humans (and maybe aliens) would stay gainfully employed for as long as the Elders remained active.

Humans Are Competitive for Low-Skilled Labour

It might simply be that it is difficult to improve very much upon the price-performance ratio of humans for some types of relatively unskilled work (i.e. work that does not require superhuman intelligence), especially given that humans will reproduce and raise more humans for free. In that setting, your galactic empire will entrust highly complex technical work to AIs (say, the design of secure battle station exhaust ports), but simply has no reason to completely automatize the myriad of menial tasks that have always been done by manual labour and that can be executed satisfactorily in that way (for instance, the planet-side part of mining operations on planets not yet uninhabitable).

Answer 13

In some not-too-near future there will not only be no blue-collar workers; there will not be any white-collar workers either. There will be almost no traditional gainful employment whatsoever because AI and robots will be so much better at almost all professions you can list, probably including research and science.

The only pockets left where humans still are working professionally will be human-to-human interaction which per definition cannot be automated: Some education, and some care, e.g. for the elderly, even though much of both — mainly the routine parts — will also be done by machines.

Humans will only do what they want to do: Produce art, pursue hobbies, play, travel. It is entirely possible that some people would travel to dangerous places, as a hobby. In a scientifically advanced society people will be almost immortal; that will probably affect their stance towards risk-taking. Compare that to the elimination of ever more remote risks already today: Every toddler has a 5 point belt in their buggy. Because they simply don't die from other reasons any longer the remote possibility of a buggy accident has become t op risk to toddlers. Virtually immortal people will likely be extremely risk-averse. Driving their own cars will be the equivalent to free solo climbing today: "But if you make a single mistake you die! That's insane!"

On the other hand there are free climbers today, or the Russian kids riding on the roofs of trains for fun, inches from the high-voltage lines. Such fads will likely be there even among immortals, and traveling to an asteroid mine could be a thing you can book in a travel agency, even though most people would shake their heads in astonishment over such foolishness.

Answer 14

Overall you have it backward. Most of the white collar office work will be automated. Blue collar work in running/repairing the machinery will be much later in the automation cycle. The jobs left will be fixing/operating machines, and dealing with people.

Story time: I run a tree farm. Not a big one. We do about a quarter mill of trees per year. I could buy a potting machine that can pot 400 two gallon trees per hour. It takes 4 people to operate. I have to change pot holders if I want to switch from using a Listo pot to a Nursery Supply pot. The machine costs 60 grand, and uses only standard peat and bark mix soils with a density of about 0.3. I have to run it a month a year to break even.

Instead I use high school kids. 4 high school kids can do about 150 pots an hour. A verbal command changes the watering, fertilizing, and multching system. When I don't have trees to pot, I can put them to work weeding. Or emptying dead pots. Or sorting pots. Try doing this with a potting machine.

The human hand is a great general purpose tool, and it's a meta tool too.

Answer 15

If your word is mostly AM it is probable that blue collar job still exist. heavy machinery will do a lot of the job, but it's probable than this kind of job will still exist for several reason depending on your world rule

Manual labor (even if assisted by machine) could have several advantage in comparaison of the one of machine:

-high adaptability. human can do a lot of different thing where as for a machine it might be extremly hard to do something it is not thinked for: from their tool to the IA in them their specialised tool and there is no reason to give even to an extremly advanced robotic arm the ability to do everything.

-much less constrained by their environement. a bit like above, but it's more about where the work happen. it's not unthinkable to have some mining/space operation where machine are still unable to effienctly evoluate in, where as a living being with the proper equipement would be more efficient.

-artisanal added value: especiallly in a universe where the machine do more and more the feel of something that was made by another living being would be extremly valuable, so it's not unthinkable it would be profitable for compagny to have large scale operation to make handmade item to "sell" some autenticity to richer population.

-replacability. it's cynical, but especially in a space opera, the number of living being if of the chart so having population entierlyo devoted to cheap manual labor could be cheaper than maintaining huge machine that cost a lot to replace when something goes wrong.

-qualified blue collar: it's a shift we are seeing more and more today, but even blue collar job start to ask for qualification. so it could be plausible that if the machine do most if not all the production you still need a laborforce who will be able to keep the machine running.

Answer 16

Ethics
One thing AI is unlikely to ever outperform humans, is ethics. If anything, because ethics is something volatile that humans agree and modify over time based on their own perception of humankind.
When a given AI system is forced to balance certain outcomes, it may make a purely optimal decision, minimizing harm or maximizing benefit. Humans, on the other hand, can see beyond such "value function", and consider other particularities such as fairness, empathy and emotional well-being. This is why multiple-choice exams are not that frequent.

Answer 17

Late-stage capitalism.

In our own world we've already seen how capitalism, instead of lifting all boats, invariably ends up creating different classes of wealth. It also tends to disproportionately concentrate large amounts of wealth in the hands of very few people. The only thing that prevents blue-collar workers from being exploited even more are laws protecting them.

Take those laws away and you have a dystopia where such protection laws don't exist, and thus employers have zero incentive to use more efficient labour (robots) because less efficient labour (humans) is cheaper and easily available. The "working class" in this scenario has almost no rights and are essentially wage-slaves.

Answer 18

Advanced aliens have manipulated what technologies society has developed.

So, the Lensman series was a series of Pulp scifi novels that involved the tituar Lensman (psychic, uncorruptable space police) flying around on planet-destroying spaceships that used slide rules and vacuum tube computers for navigation. Some time later, a supplement for the roleplaying game GURPS was released for playing games in this series' setting, and one of the things proposed by it was that the advanced, benevolent psychic aliens who founded the Lensmen were responsible for manipulating human society's technological development to prevent the invention of the semiconductor, since advanced computers would cause a psychological reliance on them that would inhibit the development of psychic powers.

It's possible that your setting might have something similar going on, that prevented the development of the sort of technologies that would allow for the sort of automation that you'd want to prevent happening in your setting.

Answer 19

There is a bell-curve when it comes to automation, where extremely wealthy and advanced societies actually start reducing automation in some areas. Having hand-made things is a major status symbol already today. Look at the chess sets for the World Chess Championship for an example. Woodworkers train for years to hand-carve the pieces. FIDE could easily just go to Wal-Mart and buy a few dozen injection molded plastic sets, but that wouldn't be prestigious enough.

So maybe the wealthy elite in your setting want hand-made luxuries, some of which can be dangerous to produce.

Answer 20

I can imagine a world where Luddite Workers forming a kind of trade union where they destroy several robots to maintain a workforce. Alternatively it could be a populist leader that is "andoridist" where human like androids are treated like minority groups have at different points in history and hence are a low priority for work. Alternatively there is an agreement that machines should not be fully automated with fear that they may turn against people and so every group of robots would require a master to oversee their actions.

Another idea is that perhaps there was a population explosion and a material shortage so workers are a more available resource and would be needed to extract materials to make more robots. Or quite simply, as others have noted, workers might be cheaper than robots so there was a shift from automation to manual labour. This actually has precedence in today's world. Some manufacturing and laborious work has shifted away from automation to cheap overseas labour as it costs less than installing, operating and maintaining machinery.

Yet another idea is that people with a sense of adventure might want to explore new lands in spite of the risks. There is no shortage of people wanting to join a potential future mission to Mars even though it has not been done and so could be very risky. Or many explorers in the past sailed into the unknown in spite of the dangers of the sea.

Finally perhaps resources are very precious so there is a situation like the Gold Rush where people flock to new lands to get rich.