I want to tell you straight off what this story is about: Sometime in the next 40 years, robots are going to take your job.
I am reluctant to engage in this sort of economic science fiction discussion, because I don’t have confidence in our ability to project how something like this will play out. But if Drum is correct that robots will be able to perform all existing jobs, then I don’t mind, for many reasons.
The number one reason is that, assuming this plays out, there is a flip side: goods and services will be cheap, and in fact for all intents and purposes they will be essentially free. Take heart surgery as an example.
Today, heart surgery is one of the more expensive things you can get. But if you take all of the labor out of health care, then heart surgery does not need to cost more than a happy meal.
Won’t you have to pay a lot to the people who own and manufacture the robots that provide health care? I would say not, for two reasons. One reason is that in order to drive out human heart surgeons, the robots will have to use lower prices and/or higher quality to compete. And then they will have to compete with one another. Furthermore, in this futuristic scenario, the robots will themselves be designed and made by robots, so that the robot heart surgeon will be a cheap commodity, at least if there is competition in production.
So I am thinking that people’s needs, at least as understood in terms of today’s goods and services, will be taken care of in a scenario where robots “take our jobs.” We should not worry about “mass poverty” in a world of almost unimaginable abundance.
The next thing you might say is that without jobs, life will lose meaning for people. Well, I have not had a regular paid job in more than twenty years. My life has not lost its meaning. If your material needs are nothing to worry about, and you are tasked with finding a meaningful life, you can figure it out.
If you think that you can make your life meaningful today by worrying about a future robotic scenario, then go ahead. A lot of economists seem to want to do that nowadays. But I am not going to devote much effort to it.