The Post-Post-Industrial Economy

This post by Ezra Klein brings up a fascinating subject that any sci-fi reader or aspiring Luddite has come across. Scene: The future is glossy, bright, and full of robots. The ubiquitous availability of our synthetic friends has made the worker obsolete, leaving only the rich and powerful titans of industry with the means for accumulating wealth. Thus, underneath the shiny exterior of future full of Roombas on steroids is the seething mass of the unwashed billions that those smart vacuums replaced.

This is a realization that I think pretty much anyone who ponders the mechanization of industry comes to. That said, these are the exact same fears that the Luddites had in 19th Century Britain. Certainly the prospect of the complete mechanization of industry is far more real today then it was then, but what, besides scarcity of resources (which is theoretical in nature) prevents the dispossessed millions of factory workers from becoming robotic operators, replacing a system of many workers in fewer factories with few workers but in many many more factories? In other words, rather than robots replacing humans, they could just make us drastically more productive.

This, of course, assumes that everyone has the mental capability to operate in this environment and that the availability of necessary resources tracks with the expansion of capacity. Not to mention the constraints of demand.

I think that in the end what we will see is a continuing expansion of the service industries, since human interaction is still, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, the preferred method of customer service by the customers themselves. That said, it's unlikely that these jobs will increase in pay significantly, and it's very likely that those who own the factories in which robots replace humans will reap the benefits of even more outsized earning power in comparison to the rest of society. The solution, I think, is that a generous welfare state which provides supplemental assistance to meet the needs of the majority exists funded by a very progressive tax structure.

Humans will always find ways to work, it's merely a matter of how much they receive in compensation. With the means of production reaching a point in which workers themselves are unnecessary, it's only a matter of which sectors of the economy swell in the workforce in response.