Utopia/Dystopia Arriving

Or, why human may be like horses.

What do we do when there is no productive work for people to do? And we're getting to that point, given that, seven years since the Great Recession began and five years since it technically ended, unemployment remains stubbornly high and only the top 1% (or fewer) are doing better economically. The labor force participation rate began to fall at the start of the Great Recession and has not recovered since then. In fact, labor force participation rate has continued to slide downwards. In essence, there are not enough jobs for everybody who wants one. At present, there is no prospect for that changing in the foreseeable future.

As the video implies, higher education may actually make things worse. Under our current system of higher education, more and more students are graduating with higher and higher amounts of debt. Without decent jobs, they will never pay that back. Without decent jobs, they can't buy a home or a new car or new furniture or most of the other consumer goods, the purchase of which has been the foundation of our economy for generations.

It wasn't just the Internet which killed Blockbuster Video. At the same time that Blockbuster Video was closing stores, Redbox began showing up in grocery stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. In the parlance of the video, robots replaced the blue-shirted workers in the video stores. In many towns nowdays, if there is still a video store, it likely is renting porn out of a back room.

Think of those fast-food places. People go there for sameness. A Big Mac or a Whopper is the same, regardless of where the restaurant happens to be. It won't matter to a lot of people if their order comes out of a slot instead of across a counter. Robots won't drop a box of patties on the floor (and then put them on the grill) or spit in your food. It probably won't be too long before we begin to see the Redbox equivalent of restaurants.

Humans may not be "terminated" by legions of killer robots. But we may be made redundant. What does this means for the future, when more and more people who graduate from high school and college realize that, no, the world isn't your oyster or that they no longer have a great and shining future, but that they have almost no chance of ever having gainful employment?

Will a lot of ceremonial jobs be created, where people go to jobs that essentially will be "stand here and watch the robots work"? Will we have hundreds of millions of people consigned to idleness and poverty? What does that mean for families, when potential parents know that their children's lives will be as bad or worse then theirs live are?

However it plays out, the robots are coming for your job. The job of planning how society will adapt is one that is both too big for any of us and is one that our national leaders seem to be doing their very best to even avoid thinking about.

But it's going to happen, regardless.