Marshall Brain’s essay on the future of that human endeavor called work in the midst of a robotic revolution has been making the rounds and is both interesting and alarming. He speculates that the wide-scale introduction of robots into every level of work that humans perform in the near future can either transform human society into one of two competing and opposite futures. One is essentially Utopian, where automation leads to the elimination of work and people are insanely free to pursue their goals and follow their hearts and passions. The other is Dystopian, where the divide between the richest and the rest grows even greater as automation leads to great profits and massive job displacement of large segments of society caused by robots.
Essays like Brain’s are of course extremely speculative, but while I was reading about his predictions for the Dystopian future, I recalled that in the last 30 years, the richest 2% of the population now own 98% of the wealth in this country. I also read that this recent jobless recovery includes jobs that will never come back because they have been outsourced to countries with cheaper labor. These are highly skilled white-collar positions filled by intelligent people who have essentially been displaced from their industry. This is not to argue the validity or invalidity of any of this reality. But imagine such displacement on a massive scale and you can envision the kind of chaos and instability that would occur.
To the extent that you believe any of Brain’s ideas, we already exhibit symptoms of his negative future right now, and I can’t help but feel we are on a knife’s edge of some sort, regardless of whether or not robots take over our work. Much grist for the mill.
