“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man’s nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become Golems, they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.”— Erich Fromm

During the last several centuries, the economy of the modern world emerged from a contract—unwritten, unspoken, almost unrecognized—between risk-takers who started businesses and the hirelings who did the work to ensure those businesses’ survival and profitability.

Enterprises of the kind that exploited natural resources, turned those resources into mass-produced goods, and then sold those goods to customers could only get really big through thousands of people digging, manufacturing, building, selling, and bookkeeping, not to mention countless other tasks both large and small.

In turn, those workers could only afford shelter, food, and clothing for themselves and their families through the wages that the company provided in exchange for their labor; paychecks which, incidentally, helped those workers buy the products sold by countless other companies, which provided the revenues for those companies to pay their employees. And thus, a complex economy arose, and mostly thrived.

This venerable contract, which has been in place at least since the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution nearly 300 years ago, may be coming to a close. What comes next is a puzzle that politicians, futurists, sociologists, philosophers, and the rest of us, together, are struggling to solve. Yet solve it we must. The future of work is a mystery that holds the key to the next stage of human advancement—or decline.

Scaling down is the new scaling up

For industrialists of the past like Josiah Wedgwood, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford, workers were assets necessary to creating economies of scale, driving down costs and ramping up profits. Conversely, for today’s mega-moguls like Jack Ma or Mark Zuckerberg, employees are liabilities to be managed, risks to be mitigated.

Consider the Jeff Bezos-led company, Amazon, which employs more than 600,000 people and may soon carry an astounding market valuation of one trillion dollars. Today, large numbers of Amazon’s workforce do their labor in company warehouses, and although their individual salaries may not be impressive, in sum they represent a sizable chunk of Amazon’s total operating expenses. Now imagine that the work of those warehouse employees—processing orders, finding products, packing boxes, and arranging shipment—could be handled exclusively by robots and drones. The savings for the company would be astronomical, and that would be a great thing for Amazon, especially its top managers and institutional investors. It wouldn’t be so great for Amazon employees. Extend the thought experiment a bit further and ask yourself what would happen if not just Amazon employees but those at almost every company throughout the world lost their jobs to automation. Who, then, would have the money to buy all the stuff Amazon wants to sell?

These are issues for a future that’s not quite here, but even now, the changes that have already been wrought by automation are affecting the world in significant ways. In manufacturing, optical sensors that can scan high-speed production lines and kick out defective parts or products with awesome efficiency have cost many a line inspector his or her job. In the world of media, print publications, with their quaintly untrackable branded advertisements, have died the death of a thousand cuts, slayed by the abandonment of advertiser after advertiser in favor of the immediacy, precision, and provable ROI of online platforms like Google and Facebook. Taxi drivers who paid small fortunes for hack licenses and medallions have seen their investments erode with the advent of Uber and Lyft and the coming prospect of autonomous vehicles. All these changes, and many more, have improved quality, reliability, and output for producers and consumers, but they’ve all cost small slices of the populace their gainful employment.

Politicians and investors weigh in

Of course, the people on the wrong side of early-onset automation know all about this story. And now, politicians are starting to notice and take an interest in the issue as well, at least partly as a way of proving their populist bona fides. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle talks about businessman Andrew Yang’s plans for the country, should he succeed in his long-shot campaign for the presidency in 2020. A sentence in that piece reads, “His plan, he said, would give the 68 percent of Americans who don’t have college degrees—the ones most likely to become unemployed [due to automation]—a basic income that would help boost spending and the economy while the country invests in technical and vocational training for them.”

My question: training to do what, exactly? Some of these displaced workers will gain marketable skills that may put off, but not eliminate, their vocational vulnerability. It seems to me, however, that most training these workers might receive would be in fields representing the lowest of low-hanging fruit for increased, relentless automation. Therefore, retraining might just be kicking the can down the street for these folks. (And lest you think I’m some kind of liberal-arts snob, let me state my belief that automation will knock out a lot of writing and editing jobs, too, so I’m likely to be in the same boat sooner or later.)

Another piece, published on the excellent FiveThirtyEight website, further examines the possible implications of wider experimentation with Yang’s core idea, universal basic income (UBI), particularly as it applies to the coming automation avalanche that threatens to bury millions of U.S. workers. Top managers at seed accelerator Y Combinator and venture capitalist firm Union Square Ventures, among others, have spent the past few years examining the implications of automation and the broader economy, and have come to the conclusion that a complete re-think is needed about the nature of work as it relates to the priorities and time management of individuals and the human race as a whole.

Albert Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, is one of the true thought leaders in UBI and the future of human endeavor. His free ebook World After Capital, takes a very different approach to the logic of work and resource allocation. Automation, in Wenger’s view, will unlock more time for us —all of us—to focus on big-picture, extremely long-term issues of great import for all mankind: the environment and climate change, health care and fighting pandemics, space exploration and humanity’s ultimate destiny. Achieving our goals as a species requires that we not spend our time grinding away and making just enough money to live. With UBI, “You’re put in charge of your time,” says Wenger. “You’ll have 100 percent of your time available to you.” And think of what can be accomplished when we have all that time to co-create our future.

I’m not saying that automation will replace most or even many flesh-and-blood workers this year, or next year, or even by this time next decade. But at some point this century, if people far smarter than me are correct, we’ll have few if any human beings earning their living through physical labor in factories and warehouses, preparing food and waiting on customers, transporting goods and delivering packages, or diagnosing patients and nursing the very young and the extremely old. It’s quite possible that even building, programming, maintaining, and repairing machines will be handled by machines. And although that might be scary, what’s really terrifying is what happens to a society that fails to make sense of complexity and is unable to offer its citizens meaningful work.

(C) Mike Richman.  Piece was originally published in Quality Digest.

BIO:

Mike Richman is the principal of Richman Business Media Consulting, a marketing and public relations company working with clients in the worlds of manufacturing, consumer products, politics, and education. Richman also hosts the web television program NorCal News Now, which focuses on social, economic, and political issues in California. He is a contributor to (and former publisher of) Quality Digest.