Twice in one week, I had someone ask me about what happens when all the jobs are automated and only people who are highly skilled robot engineers or computer programmers can find work. Essentially, this is a luddite position dressed up in an age of presumably advanced technology, but its just as silly as it ever was. We might as well be asking how will people find work when there are machines and switches to wake people up, light city streets, and refrigerate food? Of course... We dont ask that, because all this happened 100 years ago, and we know the result: Innovations removed old jobs and replaced them with easier, less dangerous, and often higher paying ones to do other things. If I dont have to pay a guy to throw little rocks at my windows to wake me up every morning, I might start to pay him to wash those windows instead. Nobody asking that question ever thinks about the savings-side of the transaction. Flash forward to a future where robots are literally doing all the work humans currently do for each other, and the fear is even more schizophrenic. If machines are able to produce every good or service humans of 2015 currently enjoy, and they can do this cheaply, effectively, and they can produce 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with no breaks and no holidays, we will be enjoying a world where everything we might want and need will be absurdly cheap - which means that it would be possible to maintain a pretty decent standard of living on almost no income. Thats a huge benefit even to low-skilled people because it would free them up to spend lets say 5 hours a week doing the future equivalent of washing windows, and theyd get the balance of their week to learn new skills or even invent something no one had thought of yet. And if that doesnt happen - that is, if goods and services are produced by robots with currently unimaginable efficiency, and stuff costs more than it does now - then the robots clearly wouldnt be an improvement over human workers and thered be no reason to make that shift.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 23:38:05 +0000
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