PHOTO/BOSTON DYNAMICS
Momentum Machines, based in San Francisco, has a robot that serves 400 hamburgers per hour. The company’s cofounder, Alexandros Vardakostas, stated, “Our device isn’t mean to make employees more efficient, it’s meant to completely obviate them.”
While the above example applies to the fast-food industry, it could be applied to any industry. Millions of jobs have already been wiped out permanently because the computer and the robot can do them faster, cheaper and more efficiently than a human.
Four million manufacturing jobs alone were automated in the U.S. since 2000. And millions more jobs are on the chopping block—including white-collar and skilled blue-collar jobs—as the computers and robots become more and more capable.
During his presidential campaign, Andrew Yang pointed out that technology is replacing labor, and suggested a universal basic income as part of the solution. As Yang notes in his book, The War on Normal People, the outsourcing and automation of millions of jobs has left far fewer jobs existing in the U.S. today, and most of the jobs that do exist pay meager wages.
Yang wrote that “Companies can now prosper, grow, and mint record profits without hiring many people or increasing wages. Both job creation and wage growth have been weaker than the top-line economic growth would suggest since the 1970s. In each of the last several decades, the economy has created lower percentages of new jobs. . . .” The chart below, taken from Yang’s book, shows the percentage of jobs that were net new jobs in each period.
The technology will only get more sophisticated over time, and eventually all jobs are at risk. Clearly we can’t continue to have a society based on people having jobs.
Having a universal basic income that people can actually live on is a start, but we ultimately have to take society away from the corporations and billionaires and run it in the interest of the people. Then the abundance the technology makes possible can be shared by all.
