In today’s New York Times piece by Eduardo Porter, Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two (https://tinyurl.com/y72qmxlj) the threat of automation is foregrounded.
The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.
— Eduardo Porter
But the cost of automation to workers and society could be substantial. “It may well be that,” Mr. Summers said, “some categories of labor will not be able to earn a subsistence income.” And this could exacerbate social ills, from workers dropping out of jobs and getting hooked on painkillers, to mass incarceration and families falling apart.
Silicon Valley’s dream of an economy without workers may be implausible. But an economy where most people toil exclusively in the lowliest of jobs might be little better.
I’m sorry, but Silicon Valley dreams of an economy without workers? That is absolutely not the case. Many in Silicon Valley, particularly in the AI and robotics fields are deeply conscious of how their work is impacting the labor market.
Many understand that the middle-class job-for-life is not coming back, and so support measures like a universal or minimum basic income precisely to offset the massive gains in productivity and concomitant losses for human laborers that automation generates for society.
Automation is here, just like the combustion engine is here, just like global warming is here. The question is not how do we go back to heartless 19th century human-as-machine manufacturing, but how we go forward.