...It may turn out that the “rise of the robots” ends up augmenting human labor instead of replacing it. It may be that technology never exceeds our mental capacity. It may be that the fall in labor’s income share has really been due to the great Chinese Labor Dump, and not to robots after all, and that labor will make a comeback as soon as China catches up to the West.
But if not—if the age of mass human labor is about to permanently end—then we need to think fast. Extreme inequality may be “efficient” in the Econ 101 sense, but in the real world it always leads to disaster.
But is your confidence high enough to counterbalance the loss if it turns out you’re wrong?
In the piece, Drum links this article by economist Noah Smith, which concludes: