Daily Kos: Future Politics: Robot Workers and the Universal Living Wage

An increasing volume of news coverage has been exploring how advances in automation are outmatching human workers in both brawn and brains. In the past month, a three-partseries in the Associated Press and a feature on 60 Minutes have increased the chatter about how automation is replacing jobs faster than it's creating them, and how extremely-large-scale permanent structural unemployment could become a reality sooner than many expect.

Unlike with the industrial revolution that replaced only brawn, automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't. Take the example of ordering a pizza with automation. You'll go online and place your order. The system will instruct a machine to make your pizza. The machine will then deposit the pizza into a driverless pod that will wheel out of the store and into your driveway, where it will text you that your pizza has arrived. On the back end, the ingredients will have been shipped without drivers from ultra-automated farms, and even the pizza-making machines and delivery pods themselves will have been assembled and transported by robots. No human will have ever touched or seen your pizza or anything on it at any phase of its production. Not even the pizza shop will have a human to supervise it, because it will be reduced to a glorified vending machine, like this, taking calls and e-orders and sending out pods with pizza. All production and transportation up and down the entire supply chain, from farm to table, will be automated, with precious little human employment in between. Sit-down restaurants are not immune. And virtually every other product you buy will similarly have human employment hollowed out of the process and replaced by an automated supply chain.

So if human employment is systematically eliminated throughout the entire process of producing, transporting and selling goods, will all our jobs be in services? What about, say, highly skilled services, like medicine? Surely, those fields are safe. But today, robots are already diagnosing diseases by analyzing more medical literature than a human could possibly memorize, finding trouble spots in medical scans that are undetectable to the human eye, performing surgery to remove said trouble spots with more precision than a human hand, and filling prescriptions for the recovery without human error. And there will only be more advances.

So if we don't need much human employment to supply our goods and we don't need much human employment to provide our services, how will we have full employment?

Creative fields will likely have jobs available, but Forbes has replaced business writers with robots that are also entering the fields of sports, real estate and even political reporting by taking data points like field goals, home sales, votes on legislation and polling results and putting them into prose. Their writing and analytical skills will only improve. Major music studios are using software to analyze hit songs and to help compose new ones. Computer-generated divas are making pop music more artificial than ever. And many local news studios have become hyper-automated, with automated cameras, microphones, lights and commercials being controlled by preprogrammed scripts and "centralcasted" from control centers thousands of miles away. Many anchors are alone in their studios, talking to robotic cameras, and even operating their own teleprompters with a foot pedal.

There will still be a need for computer programmers, but a lot of programming can already be automated or farmed out to freelancing websites where the only minimum wage is zero. Call centers to answer our questions about our machines will be increasingly taken over by software with a complex understanding of language. There will still be sectors where a human touch itself is highly valued, but even in a human care environment like a nursing home, there are robotic puppies providing companionship and automated sensors checking vital signs.

While there will be human jobs left in some places, we simply won't need full human employment to fulfill our daily needs. Our daily needs are already being fulfilled with fewer human work hours as we buy machine-made goods from online stores stocked by robotic warehouses and as we use kiosks and self-checkout machines at physical stores that are vanishing chain-by-chain due to the low costs of low-human e-commerce. The percentage of Americans with jobs is at a 20-year low at least in part because businesses hit by the recession have figured out how to replace expensive human workers with automation.

What we haven't seen yet is what made the industrial revolution a boon to human employment: an explosion of millions upon millions of new well-paying human jobs in new fields never before imagined. One boom industry that optimists routinely cite today is mobile apps, but what is less often mentioned is that the average app publisher makes just $8500 a year, poverty wages even before you divide them by employees-per-publisher. So barring the development of a new middle class of well-paid human workers in a world of robots assembled by robots, how does a society that doesn't need as much human labor, and doesn't need to pay as much to the humans it does employ, cope with large structural unemployment and low median incomes?

One idea to consider is the universal living wage: guaranteed basic income for everyone. It's already coming under serious consideration in several countries.

If automation replaces workers, consumers will no longer have wages to spend. Companies will effectively automate themselves out of a customer base. Some new mechanism would need to replace employment as the pathway whereby wealth transfers downward to the general public, to the consumers.

Instead of money transferring downward through human employment, it could transfer downward through taxation of the record profits of corporations that no longer have to pay for human labor. The S&P 500 is already reporting 1/3 more profit than before the recession while employing fewer human workers. The establishment of a universal living wage paid unconditionally would then distribute a guaranteed basic income to the public, without means testing. Governments would be able end traditional social security, welfare, food stamps, housing assistance, energy assistance, etc., as everyone will have guaranteed income to purchase their basic needs. And businesses will compete in the free market to earn the universal wages of the public.

People wanting more than the universal wage could go to college using the universal wage to pay their bills while they train for the available human jobs or explore new ideas that could advance humanity. Or they could save up or pool their wages as capital to start their own businesses. Or they could volunteer for a cause they believe in, pursue creative enterprises, or try a venture they love without risking poverty if they fail.

Among the countries that are exploring this idea is Switzerland. There, backers of the proposal have launched what's called an "obligatory initiative" under which parliament will have to debate the proposal and present a multiple-choice referendum of options for a public vote. Halfway into the initiative period, the backers have 70,000 of the required 100,000 signatures to force parliament to act, and the public political debate has already started. The proposed universal wage is approximately US$2500 a month.

An alternative response to mass structural unemployment is welfare. The universal living wage is not welfare, because it is not means-tested. Rather, it is age-neutral social security that we would all get. Social Security is politically popular because we all benefit from it. Welfare is less popular because some see welfare recipients as "takers" and see themselves as "makers," even if they themselves are currently unemployed. (This is the "my case is different" mindset that pro-life women suffer from when getting an abortion.) America's current welfare system would leave most people homeless in an automated economy, as cash welfare is available only to families with children and expires after 24 months. An application for housing assistance already puts people on multi-year waiting lists just for tickets in long-odds housing lotteries, and would be even more of a joke with higher unemployment. The only action the US government takes to keep most poor people alive today is to give them a minimum supply of food. Welfare would have to be dramatically expanded under mass structural unemployment in order to avoid mass homelessness. Perhaps this could be achieved through the negative income tax, a welfare idea that seems intentionally named to be as unpopular as possible.

Another option is to create massive New Deal-style government projects for the primary purpose of employing humans — expensive, inefficient humans.

Or we could establish quotas for human workers at companies, or flat-out ban certain types of robots and automated software.

But perhaps none of this will be needed. Perhaps automation will stop replacing human workers, or perhaps automation will create a new industry that will employ everyone again at middle-class wages. But we shouldn't be blind to why so much job loss is already happening. Nor should we let a problem this big continue to snowball without discussing our options. The universal living wage is the best option I've heard so far. Your thoughts?