Here Come the Robots: We Can Prepare for the Future Without Fearing the Future

 

Andrew Yang had his best policy moment of the Democratic debates last week when he said, “This country has been a magnet for human capital for generations. If we lose that, we lose something integral to our continued success.” Yang should talk more about immigration. And more about thorium-fueled nuclear reactors. Maybe also flesh out his VAT idea.

But Yang’s main idea, a universal basic income (UBI), is less appealing. It’s an elegant idea that would quickly look less so when filtered through the reality of government sausage-making and flawed human behavior. Then there’s Yang’s alarmist argument that we need UBI to meet the looming and “unprecedented crisis” of widespread technological unemployment. Yang: “In the next 12 years, 1 out of 3 American workers are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies—and unlike with previous waves of automation, this time new jobs will not appear quickly enough in large enough numbers to make up for it.”

Maybe. But history would suggest probably not. Sure, you can find some pretty scary studies, but also reputable ones that are far rosier. In the paper “Automation and jobs: When technology boosts employment,” Boston University’s James Bessen writes that automation “often leads to growing employment in the affected industries,” and although “automation may eliminate jobs in some industries, it creates jobs in others.”

The big labor market challenge may be job disruption and reallocation rather than sharply elevated unemployment. New skills and relocation may be necessary. What’s more, different technologies have different job impacts. In “Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor,” Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo differentiate between technology that replaces what humans currently do and technology that creates new tasks and employment opportunities. And policy has a role in encouraging technology of the latter sort. (More on all of this in my long-read Q&A with Acemoglu.) Better to focus on shaping the future — and our ability to shape it — than succumbing to scare stories and dire forecasts that lead to unhelpful, if unintended, policy suggestions like “robot taxes.”

Published in Economics
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  1. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    And the reason why this robot impact hasn’t shown up in the labor productivity number is…?

    • #1
  2. Front Seat Cat Member
    Front Seat Cat
    @FrontSeatCat

    With all this talk about robots replacing workers, everything available via app, social profiling and scorecards, no morals, no boundaries, no religion, no free speech,  100 plus genders now, just to name a few, the title may need to be changed to We Can Prepare for the Future Without a Future…. where are we really going?

    • #2
  3. Steve C. Member
    Steve C.
    @user_531302

    You’d be amazed at the number of humans it takes to facilitate and support robots. 

    • #3
  4. Pony Convertible Inactive
    Pony Convertible
    @PonyConvertible

    The first automated reaper took 12 men to operate, but did the work of 50 men.  Consequently, the were burned and vandalized because they eliminated jobs.  Think about this. If workers still reaped wheat by hand, what would be their standard of living? Would they still be sleeping next to the cows in the barn, with barely enough food to survive?  Probably.

    Except when used for war, technology always raises the standard of living of society.   Even technology invented for war often helps society in the long run.

    • #4
  5. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    Pony Convertible (View Comment):
    Except when used for war, technology always raises the standard of living of society. Even technology invented for war often helps society in the long run.

    True.  But also true that the impact on certain workers, and certain groups of workers, may be negative for a considerable period of time.  See for example the handloom weavers in England at the time of the Industrial Revolution.  

    • #5
  6. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.  

    Technology took away scything wheat, chopping cotton and 100’s of other exciting jobs from which we have never recovered, the job losses from technology being cumulative and all that.

    • #6
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