The Rise of the Robots
Sooner or later, the nineteenth-century Luddites will be proved right: automation will cause us to run out of jobs – a prospect that for some countries might be uncomfortably close. So, what are people to do if machines can do all (or most of) their work?
LONDON – What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of the robots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, this question crops up whenever unemployment rises.
In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo considered the possibility that machines would replace labor; Karl Marx followed him. Around the same time, the Luddites smashed the textile machinery that they saw as taking their jobs.
Then the fear of machines died away. New jobs – at higher wages, in easier conditions, and for more people – were soon created and readily found. But that does not mean that the initial fear was wrong. On the contrary, it must be right in the very long run: sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.
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