Prosperity for whom? The masters of mankind? Ordinary people? The country as a whole? The article never looks at the question.<p>Indeed if we could automate most tasks, as we can, we can eliminate a lot of work. The logical thing we ought to do then is pay a UBI so people can use the extra time, rather than exploit the remaining workers more and let the rest languish in poverty.
Overall, of course greater efficiency will ultimately yield greater prosperity. But this article skims over the details of how that prosperity is distributed, which is where the vast majority of the political disagreement lies. Contrary to the tone of the article's last few paragraphs, not everyone thinks unemployment benefits, earned-income tax credits, and higher minimum wage are good ideas. On the other hand, everyone supports greater employment. That's why you hear politicians talking so much about job creation, it's the one thing their voters all agree on. In the US at least, the hard part isn't job elimination, the hard part is getting the government policy in place to mitigate job elimination and wealth inequality.
Here's the thing: half of this has been going on for decades. Jobs have been eliminated through automation, creating more wealth with less human effort, which is pretty much the whole point of having a civilization.<p>However, these gains weren't distributed fairly. For the most part, the rich got richer and the rest of us--meaning not just "the poor" but everyone who's not independently wealthy--are somewhat poorer than we were 50 years ago.
This is how we got to the modern world.<p>In the middle ages there were vast tracts of theoretically arable land that simply were never developed, and even land that was being farmed saw very little investment, and thus for centuries there were low wages for common folk and food shortages were common. It wasn't that people lacked the means to make improvements, just that those with sources of capital could quite literally live as kings without needing to invest in those improvements.<p>Then the black death came and the population suddenly plummeted. In many cases there was no one to work the fields, and those that did remain demanded much higher wages. Now that labor actually cost something, it made sense to try to get more out of that labor, so actual investment was made in making the land more productive. In a generation european farmers saw dramatic increases in food production, for the first time since antiquity consistently well above subsistence levels. This allowed a greater proportion of the population to get out from food production and do much more valuable work. This moment kicks off the period of economic growth which continued to today and enabled our modern world.<p>Similarly, wherever we see comparable slave and free societies, the cultures that need to pay for their labor see dramatically more innovation and general progress than the cultures built around slavery. It is amazing how much a handful of elites satisfied with the status quo can squander human labor. Worse still, great effort is made to propagate poverty or caste systems to ensure an adequate labor pool for jobs that are both undesirable and unnecessary.<p>There is an age old myth that eliminating a job means eliminating the place in society for the people currently doing that job. Automation will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The wealthy push this narrative because cheap labor makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. When the fields were mechanized, the people who had known only farming learned new skills and prospered. When the factories were mechaized, the laborers learned new skills and prospered. Our brains evolved for picking fruit and hunting mammoths; "low-skill" tasks like working a register in retail are exactly as learned as "high-skill" tasks. Every human is capable of outperforming the greatest super computers at many tasks, and thus automatable tasks should be done by computers to free up more people to do the non-automatable, higher value-add tasks.
Let's sacrifice all for production. The author is obviously responsible for Universal Paperclips. <a href="https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/" rel="nofollow">https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/</a>
The idea that producing and consuming “stuff” is the end-all-be-all (more important than whether people have any money, for example) has already received too much emphasis in the last fifty years.<p>It’s like, as long as people are buying TVs, everything must be good. They must have money, then. Or credit cards. And the companies that make TVs make money, which makes the stock market go up, which helps people’s retirement accounts. Anyway, go buy more stuff, it’s good for the economy. That’s just capitalism and consumerism. Stuff being bought and sold benefits big corporations, and not people that much, increasingly so.<p>The current way we distribute money (and healthcare!) to most people is “jobs.” A human-centric view of prosperity would focus on whether people have what they need, and how to get money to people (which people do need, or else they need food, shelter, etc). If you assume arbitrary progressive changes in taxation and government, problem solved, I guess. Absent that, we need innovation in employing people, not innovation in making stuff.<p>I’m not saying automation is bad or “stop automating.” But as other commenters point out, the question is not just total wealth, but how that wealth is distributed. I hope everyone realizes that in 2023!