| The claim that increased automation will enable people not to work is often cited as a defense of putting people out of work in favor of automation. This relies heavily on a number of assumptions that I think are empirically completely untested: - that automating all jobs will cause all prices to go down. (It seems just as plausible that if everything were automated, then the relatively small class of people who work building and maintaining the machines wield monopoly-like power and charge accordingly, concentrating wealth even more than it's concentrated today.) - that with lower prices, people will want less money. (It seems just as plausible that people will expect to be able to keep working and buy more to raise their standard of living.) - that the intermediate state, where many jobs are automated, but people still need to work for a living, is tenable for society - that there are no significant social problems resulting from a society where nobody has to work I don't know whether these are true or not, but if they're not, the result will greatly impact the lives of millions (billions?) of people. Obviously, banning automation isn't a solution either, but it seems flippant to bet the lives of so many people on what we think might happen in a system as complex as the global economy. [edited formatting] |