Robots will steal your job
Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon Are Worth $1 Trillion, but Only Create 150,000 Jobs
Its Time to Reassess the Future of Work. Look. Robots are displacing human workers around the globe, and even the worlds biggest tech companies arent creating enough other jobs to even the scales.
Below, 60 Minutes rounds up some of the most high profile examples of robo-labor edging out the human variety: Sorting robots, manufacturing robots, stock-trading robots, oh my. Robots doing the jobs humans once did; each eliminating employment opportunities. And some of these robots are actually already cheaper than Chinese laborers. So even workers in developing countries will be fighting over robots for jobs.
The service industry isnt safe eitherthere are already waitstaff-free restaurants. Whats more, the information technology sector, that great hope for future job creation, isnt making up the difference. Not even close.
The bluntest way this is framed comes at the end of the piece: Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook combined account for over $1 trillion dollars of market capitalization. Yet they only employ around 150,000 people total. Thats less than half the number of people who work for GE. And its roughly the number of people that enter the U.S. job market every month. In other words, its a farce to believe that tech giants, internet startups, and app developers will ever be able to employ the same number of people that manufacturing once did.
The world is fundamentally changing; the economic assumptions that currently gird our society will be meaningless in as soon as a few decades. And wed better get ready to prepare for that shiftif we dont adjust the current socio-economic structure, were going to have mass joblessness, and society-wide chaos. Were going to need to fundamentally reform not just our policies but our attitudes towards work. Were going to need to re-engineer the social safety net from the ground up to account for the fact that robots are taking over on the labor front.
Whats the point of building society around a 40-hour work week, after all, when robots are doing all the heavy lifting?
We have a couple options to consider: the wisest would be to aim for something like a guaranteed minimum income. When robots are doing our work, everyone should benefit, and no one should be left out cold. Under the current trajectory, only those who own the robots will benefit from the rise of automation. The rich will get richer, the masses will get jobless. And restless.
Since there simply wont be enough job slots for the entire population, were going to have to account for the shortfall, and recognize that work, as we currently conceive it, will no longer be the average persons principal contribution to society. If were intent on maintaining a capitalist economy, theres going to have to be a basic allowance allotted to citizens thats untethered to the labor marketbecause pretty soon, the numbers just wont add up. There wont be any realistic route to full employment when robots become cheap, efficient, and flexible enough.
So we should probably look to providing all citizens a flat salary per annum. Tax the robot owners to do it; theyll be richer than God soon anyway. Or, as Yglesias suggests, we could
abolish private property in ideas and natural resources. Then by taxing pollution, land, congestion, and other externalities we have adequate revenue to provide a decent social minimum for all at which point people do what they like. Some peoples hobbies will align reasonably well with some kind of labor market opportunity whereas others wont, but society wont be organized around a work hard or else youll starve and be homeless model because there will not objectively be a shortfall of food and houses or much of anything else.
Or weve got to drastically expand and streamline unemployment benefits, and de-stigmatize unemployment.
Good thing, then, that this specter comes looming at a moment of unprecedented Congressional paralysis. Unlike coping with global climate change or immigration, we do have a few years to get these kind of reforms underwaybut Im willing to take odds that were not going to be ready anytime soon nonetheless, seeing as how everything Ive just suggested would instantly make any Tea Partiers head explode.
It is possible that the rise of the robot workforce could end up being a major boon to societywe just need to calibrate our assumptions and policies to allow it to be. With some luck and progressivity, we may yet be able to fashion some slender variant of those work-free techno-utopias dreamed up in the past. Or, of course, we could plunge into a dystopic, inequality-ravaged hell-hole where a few titans of industry reap the profits of robot labor while the rest of us hopelessly slum it up in a cyberpunk-esque future. Its our call.
Source: ieet.org