The new slaves
Will your job be done by a robot anytime soon?
Discussions around this topic are sparkling a bit everywhere, particularly in tech-savvy environments, for the others this is still a nice plot for Sci-fi movies.
I am sure you came across a few of these stories:
Cannot say I am scared (maybe because I am one of those guys that MAKE those robots, sort of) as I think our society is constantly changing, this will be just another of those changes.
That does not mean we shouldn’t think about it, in fact I think it means just the opposite: History taught us that when changes surprise us, bad things can happen (climate change anyone?).
The Egyptians used slavery to build their pyramids, since then owning slaves made rich families richer, but slaves were humans and humans have the power to organize themselves, to rebel. Slavery ended.
With the first industrial revolution, those who were rich enough to buy the machines became extremely wealthy (well, most of them did at least) taking advantage of other humans. It was another, subtle, form of slavery.
Again, being humans, the workers organized and rightfully imposed the concept that they were not just “accessories” of the machines.
They were doing a job and sometimes their job promised them a dream of climbing the social ladder: If you work hard you can increase your wealth and with that, your social position. At least that was the dream, worked for some.
But it did not work really smoothly as most data shows
To be fair analysing this kind of data (there are many public datasets and I encourage you to do some research on the topic) is difficult because of the number of biases that can alter its interpretation, but...
...most of us probably believe that wealth should be better distributed and that someone should not become richer over time just because he or she was born richer than the average.
What will happen if human jobs are replaced by machines?
Obviously, those that are rich enough to buy such machines will have a great opportunity to become richer, the others -the good old “workers”- will lose the only small chance they had to change their fate: their job.
They will be irrelevant, becoming just "customers" with no money to trade.
I believe that, if we apply the same economic model we have now to that scenario, we will quickly see a wide portion of the population being simply “expelled” from it.
I know what I would do: I would probably raise chickens, go back to the basics.
One word of advice, tho: I might still be able to hack your robots :)
… or maybe we could try to find together a good solution, ahead of time. I am in, your call.
Just to make my position clear: I am not against machines doing jobs previously or currently done by humans, that's somehow inevitable and by itself probably beneficial. I would instead discuss how our economy works.