One of my Facebook friends posted something about how the robots are going to come and steal our jobs. Because I can be remarkably polite, I just kept scrolling instead of leaving a comment. But let me tell you a (true!) short story about the job-stealing robots.

Once upon a time, there was a university, and this university had a math department. The math department employed a large number of people, on salary. Within a fairly large margin, it did not matter how much time these people spent doing their jobs; they would be paid a set amount.

This university also owned a Scantron machine. The Scantron machine was controlled by one particular department—which was not the math department. This department would allow other departments to use the Scantron machine for a fixed number of pennies per Scantron scanned. Scanning an entire large lecture calculus final worth of Scantrons would cost tens of dollars.

The department with the Scantron was unable to accept payment for scanning except as a transfer from one department’s budget to the other. So if, for example, someone teaching math wanted to spend tens of her own dollars so that she and her TAs did not need to grade a multiple choice final by hand, she could not do that. The only way for the calculus final to be scanned by the Scantron machine would be for math department to transfer over those tens of dollars. And the math department was unable to accept those tens of dollars from a person; these dollars had to be bestowed upon it by the higher administration.

And so humans graded a multiple choice final by hand, even though they were willing to pay a robot to do their jobs.