Yes, the piece is conditional; the “47% of jobs in the next few decades” estimate, which spurred me to write this, is more or less naive top-down extrapolation.
But many of the same considerations apply if long-term labour trends continue:
Anyway other powerful forces (e.g. global outsourcing, the decay of unions) besides robots have led to the 40-year decline in labour’s share of global income. But those will produce similar dystopian problems if the trend continues, and there’s enough of a risk of the above scenario for us to put a lot of thought and effort into protecting people, either way.
The IMF data suggests that labors share was lower in 2015 than 40 years ago but it was higher than 10 years ago. The last ten years correspond to the time with extremely low interest rates.
Interest rates are still extremely low. Currently, there don’t seem to be many option to effectively invest capital. The economic data suggests that we aren’t living in a world where it’s easy to invest capital into automation in a way that produces a good return on that capital but we are rather living in the great stagnation.
Yes, the piece is conditional; the “47% of jobs in the next few decades” estimate, which spurred me to write this, is more or less naive top-down extrapolation.
But many of the same considerations apply if long-term labour trends continue:
The IMF data suggests that labors share was lower in 2015 than 40 years ago but it was higher than 10 years ago. The last ten years correspond to the time with extremely low interest rates.
Interest rates are still extremely low. Currently, there don’t seem to be many option to effectively invest capital. The economic data suggests that we aren’t living in a world where it’s easy to invest capital into automation in a way that produces a good return on that capital but we are rather living in the great stagnation.