Technology Review has the article It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class: How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment?
The elephant in the room is how robotics will play out for human employment in the long term. New robots will take on advanced manufacturing, tutoring, scheduling, and customer relations. They operate equipment, manage construction, operate backhoes, and yes, even drive tomorrow’s cars.
It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, “How will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?” My concern is that without serious discourse and explicit policy changes, the current path will lead to an ever more polarized economic world, with robotic technologies replacing the middle class and further distancing our society from authentic opportunity and economic justice.
This article is a terrific adjunct to what I have been blogging about recently. I am now reading the book Who Owns The Future? by Jaron Lanier as mentioned at the end of my previous post Citigroup’s Corbat Says Spending Needed for Full Recovery.
I have been thinking about the problem of what to do with people if they are not needed for work. It occurs to me that this is not some kind of issue that we have never faced before and will be difficult to figure out.
I just thought of a huge class of people who do not need to work to support themselves, and they have been with us for a long time. In fact I have become one of them. I am retired. If you want to know what people will do with themselves if they don’t need to work to support themselves, just ask a retired person.
Instead of increasing the age for Social Security retirement, we need to be decreasing it. Just when there is a declining need for the high level of labor participation rate in the economy, we decide that people ought to work longer before they retire. Instead, we need to make it possible for people to build up a large enough nest-egg on which to retire at a much earlier age than is now common.
I suspect that over the long term, I hope, the size of the population will also adjust to the new reality. When people realize that they can retire at a younger age without the need for their children to support them in retirement, people will naturally start to have fewer children. The birth rate may drop to less than the replacement rate for a while, at least in more parts of the world, than currently.
Social Security was never meant to be a complete retirement program, or so I hear. It was meant to be a supplement to your own private plans for retirement. So, unless we change the idea of Social Security to be more encompassing, then private retirement planning will also have to change.
Who should pay for the extra cost that on a societal level will be affordable because of the great productivity of robots? The people who are reaping all the benefits of replacing people with robots should have to pay for the societal costs of worker displacement. This balancing act can only be produced by government action.
I may be the only one who sees it, but this sounds very Keynesian to me. There is the action that individual entrepreneurs take in replacing people with robots that is completely rational, moral, and profitable on an individual basis. However, when everyone does it, then it becomes a systemic problem. The only entity that can rationally, rightfully, and has the ability to balance the system is the federal (and world) government(s). (The Keynesian part is that individual actions that are perfectly sensible in the individual case cause troubles for the system when everyone does it. In Keynes’ case, he was talking about trying to save money and cut spending during a recession. Of course the reverse of this is everybody decreasing saving and increasing spending during boom times is just as problematical and is included in Keynes’ theories.)
