Machines powered by self-learning algorithms and internet connections are displacing humans from all kinds of jobs, from driving to legal discovery to acting in movies. Will there be any work left for us to do? Economics says yes. Will it be awful or will it be nice? That is up to us.
Firstly, basic economic principles and the history of technological revolutions show that displacement does not mean replacement. Humans are not going to run out of economically valuable things to do for each other. We will not share the fate of horses in the early 20th century.
History shows that human labour not only survives technological revolutions but even becomes better paid. Economic principles explain why: technologies like automation increase productivity - the amount of economic value a society can produce with the same inputs of labour and raw materials. That means we can have all the things we used to have, plus we now also have some spare labour left over. We can use that spare labour to produce things lower down on our collective list of priorities, such as mass higher education and healthcare and interior decorating and pet grooming. The reason we didn’t make those things already (or not much of them) is that they were not important enough to be worth giving up anything higher on the list.
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