Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Work-share arrangements could blunt job losses, particularly for professions in the “Human Veneer” quadrant of our risk-of-replacement graphs, where AI performs the main job task but only a smaller number of workers are needed to interface with customers. If executed well, these arrangements could act as government subsidies or incentives to keep m

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This grip of voice and exit, explained in Albert O. Hirschman’s famous framework[70], proved particularly powerful. Workers’ bargaining power led to higher wages which, in turn, led to more tax revenue to bankroll social insurance regimes and a more widespread access to capital on financial markets—all of which improved the workers’ bargaining powe

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Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been so... See more

Recognition of the scale of these disruptions has led people like Google cofounder Larry Page to advocate a more radical proposition: let’s move to a four-day work week or have multiple people “share” the same job. In one version of this proposal, a single full-time job could be split into several part-time jobs, sharing the increasingly scarce res

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