{"id":13761,"date":"2013-05-15T11:41:41","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T15:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=13761"},"modified":"2013-05-15T11:52:27","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T15:52:27","slug":"its-time-to-talk-about-the-burgeoning-robot-middle-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2013\/05\/15\/its-time-to-talk-about-the-burgeoning-robot-middle-class\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technology Review<\/em> has the article It\u2019s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class: How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s cars.<\/p>\n

It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, \u201cHow will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article is a terrific adjunct to what I have been blogging about recently.\u00a0 I am now reading the book\u00a0Who Owns The Future?<\/strong><\/a> by Jaron Lanier as mentioned at the end of my previous post Citigroup\u2019s Corbat Says Spending Needed for Full Recovery<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have been thinking about the problem of what to do with people if they are not needed for work.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I am retired.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Instead of increasing the age for Social Security retirement, we need to be decreasing it.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I suspect that over the long term, I hope, the size of the population will also adjust to the new reality.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The birth rate may drop to less than the replacement rate for a while, at least in more parts of the world, than currently.<\/p>\n

Social Security was never meant to be a complete retirement program, or so I hear.\u00a0 It was meant to be a supplement to your own private plans for retirement.\u00a0 So, unless we change the idea of Social Security to be more encompassing, then private retirement planning will also have to change.<\/p>\n

Who should pay for the extra cost that on a societal level will be affordable because of the great productivity of robots?\u00a0 The people who are reaping all the benefits of replacing people with robots should have to pay for the societal costs of worker displacement.\u00a0 This balancing act can only be produced by government action.<\/p>\n

I may be the only one who sees it, but this sounds very Keynesian to me.\u00a0 There is the action that individual entrepreneurs take in replacing people with robots that is completely rational, moral, and profitable on an individual basis.\u00a0 However, when everyone does it, then it becomes a systemic problem.\u00a0 The only entity that can rationally, rightfully, and has the ability to balance the system is the federal (and world) government(s).\u00a0 (The Keynesian part is that individual actions that are perfectly sensible in the individual case cause troubles for the system when everyone does it.\u00a0 In Keynes’ case, he was talking about trying to save money and cut spending during a recession.\u00a0 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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technology Review has the article It\u2019s 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13761"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13767,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761\/revisions\/13767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}