Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

With relatively few other attractive alternatives, college graduates have clamored to get into law or pharmacy school, and the industry has responded by expanding enrollment and ultimately producing far more graduates than the market could absorb. The fact that both pharmacy and law are also impacted by direct automation makes things even more unsu

care market is not a market at all. It’s a crapshoot.”

Figure 2.3. US Labor’s Share of National Income (1947–2014) SOURCE: US Bureau of Labor Statistics and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED).18

For those seeking a career that is likely to be relatively safe from automation, a skilled health care profession that requires direct interaction with patients remains an excellent bet.

A video of Industrial Perception’s box-moving robot can be seen on the company’s website at http://www.industrial-perception.com/technology.html.

Start talking about more money for schools, charter schools, firing bad teachers, paying good teachers more, longer school days (or years), or vouchers for private schools, and the situation will rapidly degrade into political intractability.

I think there are some basic incentives—most critically education—that nearly everyone ought to be able to agree on. The essential idea is to replicate (albeit artificially) some of the incentives associated with traditional jobs. In an age when more education may not always lead to an improved career path, it’s important to ensure that everyone ha

A Versatile Robotic Worker

In a 2009 article entitled “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” Paul Krugman wrote that “this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.”15