http://www.gizmag.com/half-of-us-jobs-computerized/29142/
Almost 47 percent of US jobs could be computerized within one or two decades according to a recent study conducted by The University of Oxford's Dr. Michael A. Osborne and Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey of Oxford Martin School that attempts to gauge the growing impact of computers on the job market. It isn't only manual labor jobs that could be affected: The study reveals a trend of computers taking over many cognitive tasks thanks to the availability of big data. It suggests two waves of computerization, with the first substituting computers for people in logistics, transportation, administrative and office support and the second affecting jobs depending on how well engineers crack computing problems associated with human perception, creative and social intelligence.
Source: The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerization? (PDF)
The question above was raised in Quora, an on line debate forum (http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-plan-if-a-computer-or-robotic-workforce-cause-catastrophic-unemployment) What follows are selected comments from people that responded.
Remember that one of the immutable laws of economics
is that actual demand (desire) for goods and services is infinite, regardless
of the ability to pay (which is used to measure "positive"
demand). If there's mass unemployment
due to consolidation of labor productivity from automation, positive demand
would crater as tons of people permanently lose their incomes and earning
power. Where are the capitalists going
to find paying customers when those customers are obsolete and broke?
We could see a situation where {oversimplified} 20% of
humans are producers/super consumers and drivers of the economy, and the
remaining 80% will largely be passive consumers, (their economic value being
defunct for one reason or another), whose consumption of super cheap goods and
services is subsidized by the 20%. In
fact, this is one of 2 inevitabilities if a huge subset of human labor becomes
obsolete. The other is revolution.
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My belief is that traditional companies, having increased in size from
the Industrial Revolution through the late 20th century, are now shrinking into
obsolescence, and that in the not-too-distant future there will be few, if any,
"jobs" as we know them. Instead, the world will begin to separate
into two relatively distinct groups: entrepreneurs on the one hand, and
personal producers on the other. The latter category will include all skilled
trades and professions, from software engineers to doctors, artists to barbers.
Each of these people, however, will be responsible for his or her own career,
which will consist of a lifetime series of individual projects coordinated by
the entrepreneurs, who will use technology to leverage a truly global,
specialized workforce.
The challenge, as I see it, is for the segment of
society that is constitutionally, intellectually, or otherwise incapable of
being one or the other. If that segment turns out to be relatively manageable
(say, under 10-15%), then society will be able to put in place safety nets and
other approaches to maintaining balance.
But if it turns out to be much larger (perhaps 50%? More?) then I think
we face potentially existential challenges in the mid-term future.
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In a future where corporations made huge amounts of
money and employed few, it's reasonable to expect that goods would be extremely
cheap and that corporations could be taxed at a high enough rate to pay a
dividend to many of the masses such that they could have an okay or good life
even if they were unemployed.
