It is often argued that robots are not here to take your jobs because robots themselves open new opportunities for jobs while they make certain jobs obsolete. This is often used as an argument against Universal Basic Income (UBI).
One level at which this argument is invalid is that shifting from one job to another is still nowhere near easy, and a Universal Basic Income helps provide a padding for the time spent undergoing this shift and gaining the appropriate skills for the next job.
There’s another problem with using this as an argument against UBI, though: the process of automation creates economic efficiency, providing the owner of the machines massive value from machines’ significant reliability advantages over people. Without the UBI, the owner of the machines, probably someone already quite well off, reaps all the monetary benefit of automation, when the economic benefits of automation should be reaped by all the people. People should be looking forward to the stage in the progress of society when, due to the brilliance of innovators and engineers past, the infrastructure is created to be able to sustain a world where people do not have to work to have a baseline living: with how impressive robots are, this shouldn’t be considered a radical idea. It’ll be a while until we get there, but the people should know how far on the way there we are from how many jobs are fulfilled by robots, and people should demand that they get their fair share of the value created by automation—value added not from the pain of labor of any human—and that as the GDP of a nation climbs up propelled by automation, it isn’t just that the worth of the people who own the machines increases while the rest stay where they are.
Jobs should exist because things need to get done, not because humans morally must work. If more things are getting done by machines, humans deserve to need to work less.
rhua
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.