Tuesday, August 12, 2003
The Robotic Future
Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works (one of the best ways to waste time online), has written an interesting series of articles on a robotic future for America. He envisions a dark future for workers as robots displace a very large number of workers in conventional jobs.
If you think about it, robots are a very good thing. Human beings should not be driving trucks, flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets. These activites represent a massive waste of human potential. The question is: what will these tens of millions of people do to make a living when their tens of millions of jobs evaporate? What will happen to the economy when the unemployment rate reaches 30% or 40%?
This seems like a Luddite argument to me, one that has repeated ad nauseam everytime a new technology showed up. In fact, unemployment rates have dropped steadily since the Industrial Revolution. Even assuming that Marshall's robotic future will come to pass, he seems to rule out structural re-adjustments (and innovation) within the economy that can end up creating entirely new jobs and absorb people waylaid by a possible robotic revolution. At least, that seems to be the evidence at hand from technological revolutions of the past.
If you think about it, robots are a very good thing. Human beings should not be driving trucks, flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets. These activites represent a massive waste of human potential. The question is: what will these tens of millions of people do to make a living when their tens of millions of jobs evaporate? What will happen to the economy when the unemployment rate reaches 30% or 40%?
This seems like a Luddite argument to me, one that has repeated ad nauseam everytime a new technology showed up. In fact, unemployment rates have dropped steadily since the Industrial Revolution. Even assuming that Marshall's robotic future will come to pass, he seems to rule out structural re-adjustments (and innovation) within the economy that can end up creating entirely new jobs and absorb people waylaid by a possible robotic revolution. At least, that seems to be the evidence at hand from technological revolutions of the past.
