Job losses

Robert Reich writes an article about the separation of company profits from job creation. I think this sort of phenomena will be part of a longer term trend over the next few decades, probably culminating in campaigns to divorce jobs from income.

I'm not as pessimistic as Reich and I think that in the near term many of the jobs will return, but with each economic cycle the number of jobs which can be automated increases, and most companies don't care whether a unit of labour is performed by a human or a machine, so long as it is done with the highest possible yield for owners and/or share holders. Currently it's possible to carry out some unit of labour more cheaply by outsourcing it to other areas of the world, where the cost of living is lower. Before long that's going to be supplemented with telerobotic working, which has similar economic effects to conventional outsourcing, with the final phase being job losses amongst the tele-workers as the telerobots are replaced by fully automated equivalents (replacing the human remote operator with some software).

Presently the level of automation even in the wealthiest nations is not sufficient for this to become an issue of popular debate, but I expect that by the mid part of this century it will be. Assuming no major disasters occur (like nuclear wars, and so on) which set the clock back, there will be a point at which human labour becomes essentially deprecated except for a few niche human-to-human (H2H) occupations.

So how will humans get along in a situation where their labour value is reduced to something close to zero? The up side is that in an automated economy there is no problem with supply of goods or services, so long as there is adequate recycling of materials and use of renewable energy for the system to be sustainable over the long term. The most obvious route is to have something similar to a citizens income, where each person is assigned an income which is some fraction of GDP per capita. This would be similar to having a minimum sharehold in the economy, but where it was either impossible or illegal to sell all of your shares.