Workers For Robots - Cremieux Recueil

This is the seventh in a series of timed posts. The way these work is that if it takes me more than one hour to complete the post, an applet that I made deletes everything I’ve written so far and I abandon the post. Check out previous examples here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I placed the advertisement before I started my writing timer.

The most major source of opposition to automation comes from groups that don’t want people to lose their jobs. This is an easily understood position that hasn’t borne much fruit historically: despite massive levels of automation compared to all of history leading up to right about now, we have more jobs than ever and there’s still ample demand for more labor.

But there are still those who think we’re currently facing an automation-induced employment crisis. Maybe I have myopia, or maybe the near future might be different! We’re entering the era of artificial intelligence and, who knows, AI might be able to finally take labor out of the hands of humans. If it can, then the transition towards all human labor being automated away might have devastating distributional impacts, creating massive gulfs in status between the automating haves and the automated-away have-nots. But in the interim between now and a seemingly-inevitable future where automation proves capable of leaving us all lazy, what should we think about it? Have we reached the point where automation actually is taking away the prospect of meaningful work for the masses, hobbling our collective prosperity, and promoting unprecedented inequality?

There is a telltale sign of automation technologies: reducing the labor share of value added, meaning that once these technologies are introduced, how much of value added goes to capital increases and how much gets captured by labor decreases…. On this basis, technologies that increase the labor share can be encouraged via subsidies for their use and their development.

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