WaPo | With the unemployment rate falling to 5.3 percent, the lowest in
seven years, policy makers are heaving a sigh of relief. Indeed, with
the technology boom in progress, there is a lot to be optimistic about.
Manufacturing will be returning to U.S. shores with robots doing the job of Chinese workers; American carmakers will be mass-producing self-driving electric vehicles; technology companies will develop medical devices that greatly improve health and longevity; we will have unlimited clean energy
and 3D-print our daily needs. The cost of all of these things will
plummet and make it possible to provide for the basic needs of every
human being.
I am talking about technology advances that are happening now, which will bear fruit in the 2020s.
But
policy makers will have a big new problem to deal with: the
disappearance of human jobs. Not only will there be fewer jobs for
people doing manual work, the jobs of knowledge workers will also be
replaced by computers. Almost every industry and profession will be
impacted and this will create a new set of social problems — because
most people can’t adapt to such dramatic change.
If we can
develop the economic structures necessary to distribute the prosperity
we are creating, most people will no longer have to work to sustain
themselves. They will be free to pursue other creative endeavors. The
problem, however, is that without jobs, they will not have the dignity,
social engagement, and sense of fulfillment that comes from work. The
life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that the constitution entitles us
to won’t be through labor, it will have to be through other means.
It is imperative that we understand the changes that are happening and find ways to cushion the impacts.
The
technology elite who are leading this revolution will reassure you that
there is nothing to worry about because we will create new jobs just as
we did in previous centuries when the economy transitioned from
agrarian to industrial to knowledge-based. Tech mogul Marc Andreessen
has called the notion of a jobless future a “Luddite fallacy,” referring
to past fears that machines would take human jobs away. Those fears
turned out to be unfounded because we created newer and better jobs and
were much better off.
