Robots Could Put Humans Out of Work by 2045

Now cut this freeloading humanity of the dole and kick them to the curb.

Anyone would like me to connect the dots and spell out unemployment and wealth inequality implications of this trend?

Yes, steam engine and industrial revolution is a good analogy, so don't forget to include poverty, forced urbanization, and social turmoil that resulted from it.

I have hard times believing that we could all find work writing apps and/or in sales&marketing if robotization takes off. Our current social net system is unprepared to deal with consequences of this.

Didn't know about steam engine and Romans. Reference?

Derid, I wish I lived in your simple world where every problem is caused by Government intervention.

Rejoice, you do actually. I am happy to bring you this good news!

Implications of large degree of robotization is that society as it exists today, with a current flavor of capitalism, would not possible.

A portion of wealth will have to be redirected toward sustaining now unproductive segment of society that was displaced by robots. In other words, a nanny state that most of you use as a boogeyman.

How do you think US will look like with DOW at 200,000 (present day dollars) and 50% unemployment?

It is quite possible that we could automate into complete economical collapse.

If no one has a job, there will be no demand, therefore no need to produce anything.

If your job can be done cheaper by a robot, then robots will be bought and you will get fired. Any other consideration, like who is going to buy goods it produces, is irrelevant as was made clear by outsourcing trends. Capitalism is schizophrenic this way. It is quite possible that we could automate into complete economical collapse.

Presently we do not have technology to automate on a massive scale at comparable price to salaries, but a number of recent developments rapidly changing this situation.

How this is going to play out? Well, you will have robotization putting downward pressure on all wages while putting upward pressure on unemployment. Meanwhile all productivity of this robotization will go toward owners/investors of these machines. The only way to compensate is redistribution via taxation or make-work programs maintained by monied elite.

Yes, you are right, 50% of unemployment is not going to happen overnight, unless cheap robotization also becomes available overnight, but claiming that it isn't possible is simply ignoring realities of technological progress.

Reality of modern life is that important work (e.g. innovation, design) is done by small % of society and it is easy to see that the rest of jobs can be automated.

Derid thinks that society will adjust by inventing new jobs. I disagree, we are no longer have any need for 'strong backs' nor will this change be contained to single industry allowing people to find employment elsewhere.

What are we going to do when phones are answered by robots, food grown, cooked, and served by robots, people and goods are transported by robots and construction and manufacturing is done by robots? Can we all find jobs in academia or entertainment?

Well, Hele's political posting clearly got automated away.

A falling labour share implies that productivity gains no longer translate into broad rises in pay. Instead, an ever larger share of the benefits of growth accrues to owners of capital.

Cheaper and more powerful equipment, in robotics and computing, has allowed firms to automate an ever larger array of tasks. They reckon that the cost of investment goods, relative to consumption goods, has dropped 25% over the past 35 years. That made it attractive for firms to swap labour for software whenever possible, which has contributed to a decline in the labour share of five percentage points. In places and industries where the cost of investment goods fell by more, the drop in the labour share was correspondingly larger.

Accelerating technological change and rising productivity create the potential for rapid improvements in living standards. Yet if the resulting income gains prove elusive to wage and salary workers, that promise may not be realised.

What led me to write another book on the same general theme as the earlier one was the recognition that the preservation of a society of free men depends on three fundamental insights which have never been adequately expounded and to which the three main parts of this book are devoted. The first of these is that a self-generating or spontaneous order and an organization are distinct, and that their distinctiveness is related to the two different kinds of rules or laws which prevail in them. The second is that what today is generally regarded as ‘social’ or distributive justice has meaning only within the second of these kinds of order, the organization; but that it is meaningless in, and wholly incompatible with, that spontaneous order which Adam Smith called ‘the Great Society’, and Sir Karl Popper called ‘the Open Society’. The third is that the predominant model of liberal democratic institutions, in which the same representative body lays down the rules of just conduct and directs government, necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system conducted in the service of some coalition of organized interests.

This development, as I hope to show, is not a necessary consequence of democracy, but an effect only of that particular form of unlimited government with which democracy has come to be identified. If I am right, it would indeed seem that the particular form of representative government which now prevails in the Western world, and which many feel they must defend because they mistakenly regard it as the only possible form of democracy, has an inherent tendency to lead away from the ideals it was intended to serve. It can hardly be denied that, since this type of democracy has come to be accepted, we have been moving away from that ideal of individual liberty of which it had been regarded as the surest safeguard, and are now drifting towards a system which nobody wanted.

Signs are not wanting, however, that unlimited democracy is riding for a fall and that it will go down, not with a bang, but with a whimper. It is already becoming clear that many of the expectations that have been raised can be met only by taking the powers of decision out of the hands of democratic assemblies and entrusting them to the established coalitions of organized interests and their hired experts. Indeed, we are already told that the function of representative bodies has become to ‘mobilize consent’, that is, not to express but to manipulate the opinion of those whom they represent. Sooner or later the people will discover that not only are they at the mercy of new vested interests, but that the political machinery of para-government, which has grown up as a necessary consequence of the provision-state, is producing an impasse by preventing society from making those adaptations which in a changing world are required to maintain an existing standard of living, let alone to achieve a rising one. It will probably be some time before people will admit that the institutions they have created have led them into such an impasse. But it is probably not too early to begin thinking about a way out. And the conviction that this will demand some drastic revision of beliefs now generally accepted is what makes me venture here on some institutional invention.

Hayek, F. A. Law, Legislation and Liberty: A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy (Routledge Classics) (pp. 2-3). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

In the case of Wal-Mart, its adoption of technology to manage its supply chain at first reaped great benefits, but over time it cost competitors and suppliers hundreds of thousands of jobs, thus “gradually impoverishing its own customer base,” as Lanier put it to me.

There are two additional components to Lanier’s thesis. The first is that the digital economy has done as much as any single thing to hollow out the middle class. His great example here is Kodak and Instagram. At its height, writes Lanier “Kodak employed more than 140,000 people.” Yes, Kodak made plenty of mistakes, but look at what is replacing it: “When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.”

Which leads nicely to Lanier’s final big point: that the value of these new companies comes from us. “Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those 13 employees are extraordinary,” he writes. “Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” He adds, “Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid.

does not necessarily mean that all service people and all service oriented societies are doomed to the same dynamic.

In US they certainly are, just look at attitudes toward McJobs.

I consider this another market failure point. Just because systematically it might be more efficient to congregate money in a few highly-skilled hands and throw everyone else into poverty, does not mean that such solution corresponds to the optimal well-being.

The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today.