Current top comment:<p>I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. --Mark Russo<p>This.
This is a serious and interesting subject which requires a better treatment than emotive words like "hand-wringing" and "worriers", and a conclusion with more depth than "in the long run, we're all dead." All the author really says is that experts disagree on the effects of automation (who would have guessed?) and that this might lead to lower pay and fewer jobs (again, hardly news).<p>Meaningless assertions like "the education system has to change to prepare young people for a world in which most of today’s jobs are automated" don't begin to answer the real question - how are we to be prepared for this change? What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? How does an economy run if a significant number of people are not earning more than a basic wage?<p>Fascinating subject, superficial and unhelpful article.
Right up until we invent strong AI (and probably even then), there's no particular reason the same thing that always happened won't keep happening; unskilled laborers will get replaced, most will retool, and no one in the next generation will train for the now-automated job. This happened to cordwainers, calculators, etc.<p>The reasoning for this is very simple. It's why the Luddites were wrong then and the Luddites are wrong now. When a job is automated away, the benefit is distributed among three areas: 1. Automation company profit 2. Automation user profit 3. End customer costs. The net benefit is always positive, or else the automation would not be used in the first place. These 3 groups do not take their earnings and hide it under the mattress. This newly produced value has to be spent somewhere. So we end up with fields that were historically not viable, but because automation lowers the overhead of doing other things, now are viable. These fields recreate the labor requirements "lost" to automation.<p>The question, of course, is how long it will take for unskilled laborers to retool, and what will they do in the time between jobs? Perhaps there will be technical solutions to speed the retooling process.
The argument resolves around the "longer-term trend toward income and wealth inequality". There is nothing however to directly link this to technological innovation. In fact I believe it is government policy which is increasing inequality rather than technology. In the UK for example, we have been seeing some clear cases of policies which have (either deliberately or inadvertently) transferred wealth from the state (i.e. the population as a whole) to the elite (i.e. the rich), e.g. the privatisation of the Royal Mail.
Job-killing is a GOAL of technological innovation, and this is a good thing. In an ideal world this would free up our time to be spent doing things we as humans WANT to do. Technological improvements should decrease the price of good and services because less resources and efforts are required to provide them. Sadly, this is not what we have seen. Working hours go up, and so do the prices. Perhaps it is due to the nature of capitalism, something like Jevon's paradox or some other unexpected behaviour.
>Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, among others, see a “great decoupling” of productivity from wages since about 2000 as technology outpaces human workers’ education and skills. Workers, in other words, are losing the race between education and technology. This may be exacerbating a longer-term trend in which capital has gained the upper hand on labor since the 1970s.<p>Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money.<p>This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never been a reliable way of predicting the future).<p>Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist?<p>This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert:<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg</a><p>The reason this meme is <i>really</i> pushed, in both adverts like the one above, talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and insecure.<p>Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits.<p>This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons - keeping the working classes disenfranchised.